2.) I don’t want to know when something’s been blocked. Why, exactly, should it be clear to me that I’m blocking ads? I actually prefer the white space on webpages - go figure!

3.) I have found a high correlation between the webmasters that hard-code their text ads into the page and skip the affiliate nonsense, and what I consider to be “honest webmasters”. If they’re willing to screen their own ads, manage their placement, and take the time out to physically hand-code it, it’s a lot more likely that they’re not going to try and bombard me with crappy advertising.

1. People who use adblocking software should do so by choice, some multi-purpose software blocks ads by default without the user even knowing what’s going on.

2. When it is used, it should be configurable, and hopefully it’s clear when something has been blocked. Whitelists are good.

3. The industry should take responsibility for the advertising problem that has grown, but users of adblock software hopefully understand that there are honest website owners who don’t participate in such intrusive, irrelevent advertising.

Face it - people are sick of advertising, and are fighting back. The advertising industry can either accomodate the general population by making advertising less intrusive and more relevant, or they can unsuccessfully fight back and spend more money than they’ll earn in the long run trying to beat adblockers.

For instance, during the whole coal mining disaster, eBay and a couple other adver-tards bought up the keyword “Coal mine”, just to get more ad exposure. If text ads are going to maintain their relevancy, the ad companies need to constrain their clients to advertise properly offered products, not just pick out keywords that are popular and annoy people.

I’ve also noticed a trend lately for some websites to set up their ads as a legitimate-looking domain, but then have it actually go to some stupid “Win an iPod for free” crapsite. This seems like watered-down domain-name hijacking to me, because if I’m looking for a new car, see an ad that claims it’s for cars.com, and it takes me to some ponzi scheme, that cheapens - and infringes on - the property of someone else. Of course, online advertisers just shrug their collective shoulders, because THEY’RE getting paid, so what’s the big deal?

Frankly, text ads are getting out of control, with a lot of webmasters going to every single affiliate out there. The idea of text ads was to unobtrusively provide highly relevant commercial interests, not to litter every margin of my monitor.

And lastly, a good reason to block text ads is that Google has started doing obnoxious image ads, which was against their original business philosophy, so I’m going to start blocking all Google ad-syndication servers until they pull them off. Most people in the adblocking community applauded the direction Google was trying to take with their contextual links, but since they seem to have abandoned that business philosphy, I’m going to dump them.

My first looks at Adblock Plus are positive as it allows good control to the user as well as the very important whitelist capability. The default set of rules in the Filterset.G, like PithHelmet’s default rules, appear to be overly aggressive.

I’ll be writing more about Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G soon.

There’s also another Adblock solution for Safari, SafariBlock. I haven’t installed that yet.

Of course, I use Linux on several servers. Do you register shareware that you continue to use?