Sad to See…
I had been a fan of the web site Japan Probe… until they sold out and started including vapid, annoying blinking and otherwise animated ads. I hate those. So I posted that I would stop visiting the site because of the ads.
Within a few hours, the comment was deleted… and, apparently, another comment as well–the comment count on the post was 5, the number appearing was 3; I can only guess someone else chimed in.
Poor form, indeed. Advertising I can accept; people work at these blogs, and they want revenue. But blinking, flashing, moving ads? Can’t stand ’em, and won’t. Yanking critical comments? Even worse.
I’ve gotten quite a few offers to put ads on my blog, many actually appearing valid. I just don’t like the idea in general. And if I am ever so hard up that I break down and accept them, I will damn sure have a policy wherein I will not tolerate any ad that moves even a single pixel.
If I like contents of a site but don’t like the ads (I also hate blinking ones – I can’t breath watching them) – I clean the site using filters in my firefox add-on. Have you got something similar on Mac?
I use PithHelmet, which allows you to control a lot of variables. The problem is, the ads are sometimes constructed so that you have to virtually blank everything but the text on a site before the animated ads will disappear. DailyKos does it, which is one reason I stopped visiting it. Japan Probe does it now, but to a greater degree.
In the last year or so the content of DailyKos has dropped significantly. I think its because it became a place where Obamaniacs congregated, and many are students with fairly raw and undeveloped opinions – whereas I’m looking for incite that is just the opposite.
At one point, I posted a criticism of Obama back when he caved on the FISA compromise, where upon one commentor replied to me saying he had gone through my comments from other postings, an said that I had not commented there regularly enough in recent days and thought that my embrace of Obama was not sufficient enough. So there I am with my 48 years of development, including a degree in Geography that most people don’t have, and a law degree from a tier one university, and some kid chastized me functioning as an ersatz Obama thought gestapo at DailyKos.
I was shocked by the immaturity. I still go there but only out of habit to get to their click board to go some place else. I view dailykos as the children’s play yard.
my two yen: ad-block and RIP (remove it permanently) for firefox are great add-ons! however, why not just RSS it? no ads at all:)
I just haven’t gotten the hang of doing RSS, but maybe I should. I think I’m gonna need to do it for my class next semester to monitor student blog projects.
However, for Japan-Probe situations, one would need to make sure that media clips–images and YouTube videos, in this case–com through in RSS–or that the site doesn’t clip RSS to just a sentence or two.
they do both:) If you use gmail, i would recommend google reader. It’s pretty cool.