Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• First Private Spaceship Flight to the ISS now has a date.
  (tags: space iss Spacex )
• Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: patents germany law europe apple iphone motorola )
• This Banana Alien Might Have Ascorbic Acid for Blood
  (tags: banana alien sculpture awesome )
• The Evolution of Fictional Characters
  (tags: Character Comics tv comic )
• If Tarot Cards Actually Predicted the Future
  (tags: funny tarot webcomic )
• D&D;: More accurate than you think
  (tags: roleplaying dnd reality )
• Problems with anti-Mormons and anti-Adulterers - will the demographics hurt the Republicans?
  (tags: republicans voting usa )
• 57% of people thought that David Cameron was right to use the veto, with 14% disagreeing and 29% don’t know.
  (tags: europe uk opinion )
• Alternative Engineering - the future of architecture!
  (tags: architecture Alternative funny satire )
• Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels
  (tags: spotify music business )
• AdBlock Plus to allow "acceptable" ads by default soon. I'm actually in favour of this.
  (tags: advertising adblock firefox )

Comments

[andrewducker]

I don't mind well-targeted ads that don't cover things up, move, play music, etc.

Text-only ads that offer me things I might actually find useful are both potentially good _and_ help the websites I'm visiting. I'm just fine with that :->

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Apart from the moving flashing musical ones, the other ones I dislike strongly are those websites that cover up like, 30% and upwards of their page in adverts, so it becomes increasingly difficult to read the article or whatnot.

Or the pop-ups. I have a seething hatred of pop-ups.

It strikes me as similiar to the issue Channel 4 seem to have. As they squeeze in ever more intrusive ad breaks into programs, more and more people decide to watch their programs via other methods. Revenue falls. So they react by shoving in more and more ads.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I got Adblock todeal with things like that, and make the internet readable again (see also things like "Readability").

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Websites must be desperate I guess. I've always wondered at the revenue streams.

[fearmeforiampink]

I use Opera's integrated adblocker for that sort of thing; it's almost certainly not as good as AdBlock, but it allows me to get rid of the big, the flashing and the distracting, fairly effectively.

The thing I'm currently finding most annoying ad-wise are the ads on The Daily Show on Comedy Central; when I first started watching it there, possibly because I didn't allow the ads bit of the flash to save any data to my computer, it didn't show me any ads. Now it shows me the same two every ad break (currently Captain America and Harold and Kumar). I mute it and do other stuff, but it's rather annoying and I don't know if it'd be possible to block it with adblock without blocking the show itself.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to chime in on this too. I think it's a bad thing that web sites have to rely on ads for money, but there you have it. In the absence of a better revenue model, I'd much rather see unobtrusive ads than block everything indiscriminately - but I'd much rather block everything than EVER have ads obscuring what I'm trying to read, or even just dancing in my peripheral vision.