I actually find some of the sub-sites at About.Com to be somewhat helpful, but I hate the way they insist on using a linking scheme that guarantees that I see their banner framed at the top of the page in my browsing session once I leave their site. It is stupid stuff like that which drives programs to strip out banners.
For example, today I went to the About.Com publishing forum and read about a new online directory of literature, Eliterature.Org. The only problem is that I am several levels deep into browsing the directory, but the URL in my browser window looks like this:
http://publishing.about.com/arts/publishing/gi/ dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://directory.eliterature.org
…and I get to enjoy a little About.Com banner along with an advertisement for EBay.
On my old site I had a Yahoo!-style directory of libertarian sites that used a CGI program so the URLs on my pages looked nothing like the actual URLs that the users were being directed to, but this as for keeping track of link popularity, etc., and when the new page popped up all of that had been stripped out and the replaced with the real URL. That is the way to do this sort of thing. In 2000, framing banner ads and making me look at bizarre URLs is very rude behavior.