Alas, I was annoyed by banner ads full of flashing, spinning things I wasn’t interested in.

“Hmm, I thought, maybe this is why I spend more time reading blogs & small independent sites than I do the big sites. They don’t have these kinds of ads.”

Yet, the content was interesting. I pressed on. For a few more (brief) pages of the series, no less. In each page, a new flashing spinning thing annoyed me.

Then, the icing on the cake arrived: an interstitial ad interrupted the page I was reading. That’s right, the page I was interested in was overtaken by something I had LESS than zero interest in. I clicked the “skip this ad link” out of habit while the annoyance boiled up.

I stopped reading the series, to write this rant.

Hey, annoying web publishers*!

I know you need to make a buck on your content now and then. Maybe if you paid your audience more respect you’d HAVE A LARGER AUDIENCE to contribute those pageviews and click-throughs you’re looking for.

This audience is now gone, and keeping her link love to herself.

*Annoying in this case being all those who allow really crap advertising to degrade their content. It’s so TELEVISION, and you know what’s happening to TV… it’s dying. People love their Tivos because they can skip this crap. Take a hint, OK?

Now slightly annoying has become a major issue for me because I can’t create events unless they exist in a known city. The customer service rep told me to “choose a supported network nearby”, and “We hope to add that city in our next network expansion.”. The Sunshine Coast looks close to Vancouver on a map, but being dependent on a ferry ride between, it’s not a trivial distance. Not like we’re a suburb. So there’s really no point in me creating events at all. And of course being excited about the possibility of events promotion, I was planning to promote the feature to others through my use etc.

I can’t help but think there’s a better way to handle the growth of networks than by waiting for Facebook to create them. Surely some kind of tagging model, maybe with some moderation for misspellings or something… something a bit more organic, would foster greater adoption of the network-dependent features. (Hmm maybe something like how Google suggests search terms could help…)

I suggest moderation etc. because I realize there are issues to be faced with this idea. I worked years ago on a system that let users type in their cities during account creation, and the typos alone made it an unmanageable mess for reporting… But I think the viral growth and scale of a site like Facebook absolutely needs a better solution to the question of where my event is happening. Because now, according to Facebook, it’s just not.

Bad enough we’ve been finding feathers all over the laundry room (evidence of struggle, but no bird to be found). And bits and pieces here and there on our sidewalks. Today’s catch was so fresh the blood looked like brilliant, wet, artist’s paint. Poor thing.

Oh, and the koi in our pond? Someone’s gotten a few of those, too. *sigh*

I know this is blasphemy in some circles, but there’s some things I find more difficult in OSX than with Windows. Current peeve: not being able to clear dialogue boxes with a keystroke, unless I want the default option. Like when Mozilla asks me if it should save my username and password, I can’t use any keys to remember it, I have to pick up the darn mouse. Or am I missing some secret-handshake-keystroke-combo? Anyone?

Oh, and I actually had to search for help on how to view image thumbnails within Finder. I totally didn’t find that option intuitive. Like, totally, dude. Ohmigod.