Tag: adblock

Browsers, Web 2.0

How to advertise to me

Advertising any product to me is becoming more and more difficult. It is not just me, there is a growing number of people who are discovering ways to skip ads almost completely in their daily lives.

In my own case, I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper but it would be years ago. I prefer to get all my news online.

I use the Firefox plugin Adblock to ensure I don’t see most ads online (see below)

This is the ENN site viewed without the Adblock plugin
Site viewed without Adblock

This is the same ENN site viewed using the Adblock plugin
Site viewed with Adblock

I used to listen to quite a bit of radio when I was on the road. Now however, I fill my iPod with podcasts before setting off on any journey and listen to those instead. This means that I am listening to content of my selection, relevant to my work, and I am not at the whim of whatever presenter happens to be on the radio.

I watch a decreasing amount of television. The TV I do watch tends to be DVDs or movie channels with no ads. I’d potentially watch a little more TV if I had Sky+ (similar to Tivo) but it is waaaaaaay too expensive.

And yes, before anyone says it, I do see the irony of posting this on a site who’s hosting is being paid for by Google ads!

So if you were an advertiser, trying to get your brand/message through to me (and people like me), how would you go about it?

Browsers

Flock browser review

I have been using Flock since it was first released last year and I have been impressed at its progress (if a little frustrated at it’s rate of progress!).

I like the seamless implementation of social media like Del.icio.us and Flickr into Flock. In fact, it was Flock which got me into using Del.icio.us. Flock was even my default browser for a while (at any one time I have Flock, Safari, Firefox and Camino running simultaneously). I stopped using Flock as my default browser however, because of its patchy support for the minimum set of extensions I want to use (SessionSaver, FlashBlock and AdBlock).

The latest version of Flock launched last week and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I heard the developers discussing the photo uploader on the TalkCrunch podcast and it sounded interesting so I have been playing with that particularly (see screenshot below).

Flock image uploader

The Flock photo uploader is fantastic! There’s no other word for it. It is simplicity itself – drag an image to the photo topbar and the uploader opens ready to upload the image.

I was previously using a plugin for iPhoto to upload my images to my Flickr account but it was very clunky. It frequently hung in the middle of image uploading and there was no way to associate photos with a Flickr set. That had to be done manually after uploading. This is all a thing of the past thanks to the Flock uploader.

As well as uploading to Flickr the Flock uploader allows you to upload to PhotoBucket. Now if only they’d implement uploading to Zooomr, I’d be able to upload to my Zoomr account from within Flock as well!

Mac, Search Engines

Google Analytics graphs on a Mac

Google announced it was opening Google Analytics – a web stats program, for all to use free last week.

Since it was launched Google Analytics has had problems – mostly related to the unprecedented demand for its use (unprecedented by Google, at any rate).

One persistent issue, unrelated to popularity is that the Google Analytics graphs don’t appear on a Mac in Safari (or in my version of Firefox – although this may be due to my use of Adblock in Firefox).

However, I spotted a tip in Mactips today which explains how to get Google Analytic’s graphs to work in Safari –

Try to force a reflow of the page, e.g. by hitting “Cmd +� or “Cmd -� to resize the text. The charts will appear.

I tried it in Safari and FIrefox and while it works great in Safari, it doesn’t work in Firefox 🙁 – Still, at least I can see the graphs now.

Browsers, Technology

Flock fails to flabbergast!

I struggled for alliteration with that title, didn’t I?

Flock is a new browser which was launched overnight – it is still in beta (isn’t everything these days? 1.0 versions are so 90’s!), and it is billed as a browser for Web 2.0! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch broke the story of the launch.

I have been playing around with it this morning and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a very slick interface on OS X – I haven’t tried it on a PC yet (see screenshot below), it has some nice functionality, and it appears to be fast and stable for a beta browser.

New Flock Browser screenshot on OS X

Like Firefox, Flock has the ability to add Extensions and when you browse to the available extensions for Flock, my three favourite Firefox extensions are available for Flock too (Adblock, Web Developer and Greasemonkey) – yeah!

Where Flock is supposed to differentiate from existing browsers is in support for Web 2.0-type apps. It does this by connecting to del.icio.us, Flickr and your blog software of (limited) choice (it has a built-in blog editor).

However, Flock was written on top of the Firefox codebase, so it should be stable and fast and it should support Firefox extensions – so no great shakes there. The blog editor is poor enough, it doesn’t support WordPress Categories, for instance, it doesn’t have a Quick Link for blockquoting and most importantly, it doesn’t seem to allow you to view/edit previous posts or drafts.

I found a very minor bug when adding my blog to the blog editor – notice in the dialog box below:

Flock Blog add bug

The explanatory text says “Click Finish to save your settings” whereas the button you need to click is labelled “Done”

The del.icio.us integration is nice – click the star button beside the uri and the address is automatically added to your del.icio.us account. You can turn on the ability to tag your del.icio.us bookmarks – this should be on by default in my opinion.

The Flickr integration I can’t really comment on as I don’t use Flickr much at all.

All in all, Flock is a nice browser but it underwhelms and I can’t see myself moving from Firefox to Flock just yet.