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Sunday, June 26, 2005

The Internet Will Eat Us All

I am eating my breakfast (over-easy eggs, toast, coffee), listening to iTunes (party shuffle--old Peter Gabriel song is on at the moment), and reading through my morning's email, which includes my favorite email of the day, every day--New York Times Daily Headlines. My ritual is to read through the different sections' headlines and abstracts, picking the articles I would like to read by clicking on each link, opening new windows for each. Yes, I end up with a crudload of IE windows (no, I cannot bring myself to like the supposedly superior FireFox), but that isn't too bothersome. I sort of consider this to be the equivalent of writing out some goals for myself and then setting out to accomplish them, which is antithetical to how newspapers are/were read. It is amazing how lazy we are compared to my grandparents' generation; they would just pick up the paper and start reading, or so I was led to believe. Maybe they have their own news reader programs to selectively read what really interests them. ;)

But I digress from the original point that I had in mind when I started typing this morning. Why is it that just because more folks have high-speed access, every commercial website out there thinks that their readers want media-rich ad content displayed inline on seemingly every page? Here is what got me going this morning. I'm culling through the NY Times Daily Headlines, grooving to iTunes with a bite of toast in my mouth when I click on a link; within seconds, my groove is disturbed by some awful noise coming from an inline Flash ad for Mamma Mia! the musical, which is also advertising a contest for a trip to Las Vegas. Sure, there is a little stop button that I was able to click to cut the pain short, but the damage was already done.

I do not need this crap destroying my Sunday morning ritual. Dammit.

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