The excessive use of and emphasis on advertising that Internet News employed on this Web page made it impossible for me to read the article. After trudging through the first three paragraphs, I decided to copy the text out of my browser and into a word processor.

I stopped myself before doing so. Why should I go through all that trouble to read their content? It's not like they're the only newspaper in my town.

At that moment I decided to do what I do in the real world, vote with my feet. From now one I will not revisit sites that present difficult user environments. I will not read another Internet News article.

As content aggregators and avid readers, we should not support such hostile user environments by linking to them. Or if practicality overrides idealism, we should indicate hostile user environments when linking to them. Like linking to a PDF file.

Doing so could help a blogger differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack and just might raise a few marketing eyebrows.

Posted by: Bob Robertson-Boyd on July 31, 2002 08:50 AM

 

Agreed with Bob that this article is incredibly difficult to read with all the ads on the page.

Another great reason to utilize Opera and it's single-click toolbar icon which removes ALL images on the page and just leaves the text. Funny that the impetus for this feature was most likely for faster loading speeds over slower connections (probably) but I use it to more clearly consume the content I want.

jonathan

Posted by: jonathan on July 31, 2002 09:40 AM

 

Bob's absolutely right.

While I don't normally read stuff about AOL (since they don't affect me in India), I decided to read this article to see what Bob was talking about.

This is shocking! But you know what's worse? I thought I'd get rid of the ads by going to the "printer friendly" page.

And it annoyed the hell out of me, because right in the middle of the page was this Big Freakin' Flash ad. In a printable page? What the fuck are these guys smoking? Do they think I'm going to "explore" the Flash ad while reading the paper version of the article? And that's on top of the two separate banner ads on both the top and the bottom of the page.

Printable pages should be in black and white, not in colour. If I press the print button on my browser, it consumes expensive colour ink in my inkjet. That pisses me off!

Posted by: MadMan on July 31, 2002 10:55 AM

 

Show me a browser that can toggle Flash on-and-off and I'll buy it.

Posted by: Jack on July 31, 2002 11:50 AM

 

Jack, you need to download the Proxomitron. The most powerful filter for web pages I've ever seen, dude. Want to turn JS off? How about Flash? Or sound on web pages? Maybe you just want to disable pop-ups. The Proxomitron does all that. I love it.

John, please link to it from the main page (with credit to me, of course :)
Your readers will thank you.

Oh, and the URL is http://proxomitron.cjb.net/.

Posted by: MadMan on July 31, 2002 12:45 PM