I had planned on posting about this last night, but a late night in the O.R. kept me from it. Consequently, Chad beat me to it, but better late than never, I say.
I join Chad in apologizing to my readers for the tornado ad that started running on ScienceBlogs earlier this week and includes a Flash animated tornado that flies over the page. I don’t mind advertising. Really, I don’t. After all, something has to pay for ScienceBlogs, and, as much as I like to think my writing is good, I doubt that many people would pay Seed for the privilege of reading it. However, I detest web ads that interfere with content, and ads that animate over the text of a web page almost always do just that. Consequently, I was not at all pleased the first time I saw that tornado. Not only is it distracting and annoying, but, as Chad points out, it destroys the functionality of any links that it happens to “fly” over in Safari and, from what I’ve heard, a couple of other browsers. When that happens, you have to refresh the page to get the links to work again, but if you do you’d better be fast about clicking on the links, because the tornado will fly over them again shortly after you refresh. (The mechanism that’s supposed to keep it from repeatedly doing that that doesn’t seem to work that well.) I assure you that the reaction among us ScienceBloggers has been nearly universally negative.
Please feel free to leave your comments about the ads right here. All I ask is that you refrain from profanity.
