Well I think it’s more about HOW people are using them than the tool itself. Used in the correct way, even on a normal blog, they could be handy.

You CAN choose which links receive the ‘popup’ and which don’t. If you can do THAT they it should be easy enough, programmatically, to add an extra [preview] link after every link you want to have the popup displayed…

But yes, blanket usage is bad. That’s why I took it off my site after a couple of days..