Media

Many of you probably read all about the plane that skidded off the runway in Denver bound for Houston last month. If you follow Twitter, you may have seen the passenger who Twittered about it immediately after.

The immediacy of the internet demonstrated in all its glory.

Today, a US Airways plane crash landed into the Hudson River. Fortunately, like the Denver plane, everyone managed to escape safely. Once again, the interwebs was on patrol.

First, on Twitter, there was this photo taken from a ferry on the Hudson by passenger and Twitter user jkrums. Then, a whole batch of photos showed up on the Flickr stream of gregol.

All of this within an hour of the plane hitting the water. I wonder who will be first to post video of the crash to YouTube. You know someone has it.

Now, I’m posting this blog and the plane went down less than 90 minutes ago. No wonder news organizations are scrambling to be the first to get a story since the internet scoops them virtually every day.

There are few things more annoying than advertisements on websites, none moreso than ads that inhibit your ability to view content. The Houston Chronicle website is fantastic and forward-thinking in many ways, but advertising is not one of them.

Exhibit A

While I’m sure Macy’s wants to get everyone’s attention now that they’ve announced they are closing a bunch of their stores, there is NO reason to force me to look at a stupid flash animation of their ad that covers the story I’m trying to read, ESPECIALLY when the ad is not accompanied by a “CLOSE” button.

Frankly, button or no, having an ad drop into the content area is just never acceptable and it makes me LESS likely to patronize any advertiser that allows their ads to be placed on a site in this manner.

Exhibit B

This is even MORE annoying if that’s possible. It’s bad enough that we have to look at a peeled back website page that – AGAIN – covers content, but this moves ridiculously slow and doesn’t show you the CLOSE button until the whole thing has loaded. That is unacceptable and, again, makes me want to not buy whatever the hell that advertiser is selling.

I get that newspapers are trying to monetize everything. They have to as print fails. But, this is the WRONG way to do it. If they didn’t have a cookie that blocked these ads for 24 hours after you’ve seen them once, I would visit far less frequently. As it is, I get most of their news through RSS feeds anyway.