Possible Duplicates:
What does rg mean?
Should tags that represent concepts be sponsorable?
I saw a tag with an "rg" icon - I had no idea what "rg" referred to, so I clicked to the tag's page - all the sponsored-links were obscured with the ads.stackoverflow.com redirect, thus were no immediate help..
Could a short paragraph of text be added to all the sponsored tag pages, explaining what is is? Even a single sentence along the lines of "This tag brought to you buy.. Redgate! *thumbs up*" would be perfect. There's no point in trying to increase their brand-awareness when I have no idea what the brand actually is..
This is not a hugely important thing - the rg icon filename was tag-redgate.png, and the links went to redgate's site - but having this information more immediately obvious would be nice.
As far as advertising goes, the sponsored tags are one of my favourite examples of unobtrusive web advertising.. but, a company selling SQL/.NET/Exchange utilities sponsoring generic tags like "performance" just doesn't seem "right". The sponsorship seems utterly irrelevant to a question tagged [c++] [performance] or similar..
Adobe sponsoring the flash tag is a great idea. Redgate sponsoring sql-server too.. but, are there limits to what a company can sponsor? Could EvilCorp (who write iTunes based nuclear-warhead design tools, in BASIC) sponsor the c#, java, php, c++ and jquery tags, purely because they are the most popular, and will be used on a wide range of questions?
I'm sure "Here, let us give you money!" far outweighs "$COMPANY sponsoring $TAG doesn't seem.. right" - so I'm mainly interested in other people's opinion, and if the SO team have any (unwritten?) guidelines on who can sponsor which tags..
