Intellitxt is really irritating!

[SUBMAN1]

Intellitxt has got to be the most annoying addition to web browsing ever invented. Pop up boxes on mouse over! If you do not know what I mean, visit this site and just roll your mouse over any of the double underlined text. It will get in the way of your reading every time!

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/19/can_ageia/

Anyway, I am on a quest now to rid it from the internet. The only way that can happen is if you can find a 'simple way' to get rid of it from every day browsing.

1. Do yourself a favor and 'Ditch' IE and go Firefox
2. Load Adblock https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/10/
3. Restart Firefox
4. Doubleclick the Adblock icon in the lower right of the screen
5. Type http://*.intellitxt.com/* into the screen that pops up:

http://img467.imageshack.us/img467/5158/adblock5zg.jpg

6. Go back to surfing the web unobstructed like you used to do!

-S

[SUBMAN1]

The more complex way but more thorough way can be achieved with an http proxy. My favorite is www.privoxy.org

If you understand how to run a proxy, you probably don't need an introduction as to how it operates.

-S

[Drebbel]

visit this site and just roll your mouse over any of the double underlined text. It will get in the way of your reading every time!

Try reading with your eyes, and not with you mouse ;)

I know many years ago people blocked images in order to surf unobstructed, or would keel haul you if you quoted above the original text.. I wonder if they are still doing that. ;)

The internet always has been full of new stuff, wanting stuff to stay like they where is difficult on the web. Eventually most people get used to the new stuff and we don't even realize it is there. On an average day I see no intellytext on the web at all, guess I know where I should click in order to see what I want.

My dad on the other hand hates those popup too, so maybe you are just getting old ? :D

Drebbel


PS: IE7 rulez ! :rock:

PS2: And yes, it is annoying, just like banners, pop ups, and all other advertising. But this one ranks at 1st place

[SUBMAN1]

visit this site and just roll your mouse over any of the double underlined text. It will get in the way of your reading every time!
Try reading with your eyes, and not with you mouse ;)

I know many years ago people blocked images in order to surf unobstructed, or would keel haul you if you quoted above the original text.. I wonder if they are still doing that. ;)

The internet always has been full of new stuff, wanting stuff to stay like they where is difficult on the web. Eventually most people get used to the new stuff and we don't even realize it is there. On an average day I see no intellytext on the web at all, guess I know where I should click in order to see what I want.

My dad on the other hand hates those popup too, so maybe you are just getting old ? :D

Drebbel


PS: IE7 rulez ! :rock:

PS2: And yes, it is annoying, just like banners, pop ups, and all other advertising
The problem is when I scroll across the screen after I just clicked a link and I hit a mouse over. I don't mind the advertising, and as long as its not in my face advertising, then all is well. The problem with this is, it is aggressive advertising like this. It is not too prevelent yet, but you will start to see it more and more. IGN has adopted it too now.

Just wait - the net will be flooded with it soon. Other sites I can see are:

anandtech

vnunet

Forbes - now cancelled due to user complaints

Driverheaven

(To name a few)

Several forums as of late too it seems. At least now I have a solution and it won't bother me anymore.

Here is one guys take on it:


Enough IntelliTxt already

IntelliTxt (http://vibrantmedia.com/site/index.html) is creating something of a buzz around the blogosphere at the moment. In essense, this technology allows marketers to sponsor words or phrases within text published on the web. The idea is good in concept, but sucks in reality.

As Rafe Needleman (http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P3553_0_8_0_C) observes, the system is open to abuse by publishers pestering their editors and reporters to use the most lucrative words - or at the very least calls into question journalistic ethics. Former Industry's Standard leader John Battelle (http://battellemedia.com/archives/000541.php) also chimes in reporting that journalists are not happy about the service.

But aside from the industry antics, let's think about this from the online reader's perspective. When I was at InfoWorld, our business development folks launched a service called Knowledge Link (I'm pretty sure that was the name) that basically did the same thing. In essence, an advertiser like Microsoft could buy a link to every word like "server" for example. The trouble was that if a reporter used the word "server," for example, five times in a story you had five identical links.

Now, take this a step further and add two or three advertisers buying different words all within the same story. Suddenly your clean copy is littered with red or blue links. It's messy, annoying, and very soon nobody cares about them. Even worse, readers start clicking off to other sites where they can avoid the visual assault.

InfoWorld wised up to all of this pretty quickly. I'm hoping other favourite sites of mine don't go down the same path.

[SUBMAN1]

Another take on the same issue:

Embedded Advertising

First, Product Placements. Now This.

Rafe Needleman (http://community.alwayson-network.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/AlwaysOn.woa/wa/display?id=756:Person) [AlwaysOn (http://community.alwayson-network.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/AlwaysOn.woa/wa/display?id=756:Person)] | POSTED: 04.05.04 @01:00



I like billboards. They are direct. There is no mistaking a billboard for anything but a giant advertisement, and there's no technological way to TiVo past them while you're driving. But billboards are archaic. On a technological platform like the Web, the billboard's analogs—banner ads—haven't historically worked all that well.

So advertisers keep trying to come up with new ways to get your attention online. One of the latest tricks is the embedded textual ad, which is being pushed by Vibrant Media. This ad type changes words in online articles into paid advertising links.

As a writer, I despise this concept. I don't want anybody messing with my text, even if the change is as minor as spurious underlining. However, it's a clever idea, and it is actually less obnoxious than many other online ad types. Furthermore, if you look at what's happened in television and movies (http://www.businessweek.com/1998/25/b3583062.htm), it becomes clear that embedded ads like this are pretty much inevitable.

While advertising is often obnoxious, it doesn't have to be. Advertisers resort to cheap tricks to grab your attention when they think you don't really care to see their message in the first place. This is why TV ads are loud, why Web banners flash, and so on.

Yet Google proved that when people are doing research online, they might actually find a paid message useful. And the more relevant the message, the less obnoxious you need to make it. The paid search links you see at the top and side of a Google search page are highly effective (http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P331_0_4_0_C), and hardly obnoxious at all.

Google's AdSense program goes to the next step: it allows publishers to embed a box of automatically targeted Google ads in their own sites (See this example. (http://www.testmagic.com/)) But those ads are still off to the side. They are like commercials during TV shows. They're not the main character drinking a Coke, the label always facing the camera.

Vibrant Media's IntelliTxt is the step beyond AdSense. IntelliTxt first scans the page to come up with a computer model of what it's about (just like AdSense). Then it identifies a few key words on the page, and converts these words to links, complete with small text banners that pop up when the user's mouse hovers over the words. Here you can see (http://cars.ign.com/articles/424/424269p1.html) the green double-underlined "Toyota." (You might have to click past the annoying 'interstitial' ad before you see the content page.)

From a journalistic ethics (http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=1208) point of view, this is pretty bad news, because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased. Vibrant Media CEO Doug Stevenson says that his customers run educational material on their sites to explain what the double-underlined links are all about, although I didn't see any explanation on the car-related example link above.

As I said earlier, as far as annoyances go, a few underlines beat the heck out of pop-ups, pop-unders, 'interstitials' that block your way to the site you're looking for, and other obnoxious ad units. You can ignore a Vibrant IntelliTxt—yet if you are indeed reading an online story to research a purchase, you might actually find the ad type more useful than annoying.

I just hope writers don't start playing to this technology—writing in an effort to maximize IntelliTxt links on their page. It may sound farfetched, but Web editors have been tweaking content to get better search engine play for years, and these changes don't necessarily help readability.

OnFolio, which I covered last week (http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=3452_0_8_0_C), looks like a good extension to Google, and likewise Vibrant Media's technology looks like an extension of what Google is already doing with AdSense.

Doug's strategy for dealing with Google isn't fully formed, which is of some concern—it's almost like creating an e-mail program without fully developing a strategy to deal with Microsoft Outlook. He has, however, set up a partnering relationship with Overture. And he's on to a potentially good business here. Advertisers are always looking for ways to get their message into editorial or entertainment content, and any product to enable that has a fighting chance for success.