The Guardian Online, An Innovative Paper, So What’s With The Slider Ads?
Like many people, a part of my morning routine when I am at home is firing up my RSS reader and checking through the day’s news headlines. This works well for me and has done for years, and one of the many newspapers I grab a feed from is the UK’s Guardian.
I generally like the Guardian. I think it is a bit of a lightweight as far as serious in-depth reporting goes (at least the online version is, perhaps due to layout constraints. I don’t know about the print version). However, the thing that I think more than makes up for that ‘lightweightness’ is that it often takes a slightly different approach to most other UK ‘serious’ papers in that it is not afraid to comment and sometimes heavily slant articles according to the journo’s opinion. It doesn’t just report the news; it also has an opinion on it. That’s good, and it is refreshing in these politically correct days to read a BBC piece that begins, for example, “The Prime Minister today laid out his vision for…” followed by a Guardian piece on the same subject that might begin “The PM is today talking bollocks again about…”
Also, the Guardian is not afraid to innovate (or at least it is not afraid to take chances that other papers do not yet take) with presentation. It has weblogs, interactive commenting, video, and other multimedia that most papers do not yet have, and this of course is another Good Thing™. (Incidentally, much of the presentational innovation at The Guardian is down to fellow Brit-abroad Ben Hammersley, who has just been taken on by the paper as their intrepid new ’Multimedia Reporter’, which is another good idea. Congrats on the appointment, Ben).
So all in all, then, as far as I am concerned the Guardian is a good online read. Except for one thing. The triangular blue animated ad that now slides out from the left of the page after some seconds and stops directly in your field of vision. Right on top of the place in the text that you have usually read down to at the time that it appears.
OK, so it sets a cookie to ensure that it only appears once every couple of days, but garish animated ads are not innovation, they are 1998. Interesting innovation mixed up with irritating late-90’s style advertising is a tremendously ill-advised idea. Don’t you think?
Note: I’m aware that Firefox+adblocker would kill that ad, but I use Camino (on Mac) as my default.
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