Daily Archive for September 11th, 2007

The Morality of Blocking Ads

Published on September 11, 2007 in Internet, Software and Technology. Closed

A recent article on Slashdot led me to start to think about this one. Is the use of software, such as the Adblock extension for Firefox, immoral?

In my opinion, no, it is not immoral. My thoughts regarding advertisements on websites is that it is a way to make money. There are ways to prevent the public from viewing the contents of your website through password protection and forcing registration or subscription (free or otherwise). If you choose to post content to a website and do not hide it behind any of these mechanisms, you are allowing the public to view it for free. It is the public’s choice as to how they wish to view web pages. Some use browsers that don’t even allow advertisements to come through, such as the text-only browser Lynx. Others use software like Adblock to prevent advertisements from displaying. My opinion is that getting paid to display advertisements on your website is a business practice. If your viewers are blocking or not clicking on these ads, it ends up being a bad business practice. Those using this technology to block ads are not stealing the content as it is available freely because they are not forced to pay for it. Again, it is the choice of the site owner as to how they pay for their bandwidth, hosting, staff time, etc.

Unfortunately, and probably because they display advertisements and need to keep those people happy, CNET has posted an editorial about this issue stating that it is, in fact, immoral to block advertisements. For the reasons stated above, I believe they are wrong on this one. If you truly cannot afford to run your site without the ad revenue, you should consider different means of paying for it, such as through the use of paid subscriptions, which sites I read regularly like Slashdot, UrbanPlanet, and Sluggy Freelance, have started to do. Relying on ad revenue for your website is like having a restaurant that relies solely on word of mouth… except that your restaurant is in a very remote area and word of mouth starts with your mother. It’s not always an effective way of paying for your site if the majority of your viewers hate advertisements.

All that being said, I do not actively block advertisements. I tried Adblock once and it blocked everything and I honestly could not figure out how to unblock certain items (like the scores on MLB.com, for instance, that are a little Javascript item). If I were to start blocking advertisements, I would only block those that take away from my viewing experience, such as the ads that appear over the text you were just reading, the ads that flash things in an annoying manner (punch the monkey anyone?), and pop up and pop under ads. I am not a paid subscriber on Sluggy Freelance or Slashdot and my subscription on UrbanPlanet does not block all ads. The ads on those sites are tame and do not distract from my reading. If the advertisers would learn that most people don’t like the annoying ads, fewer people would actively block the ads and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Walkable neighborhoods are important

Published on September 11, 2007 in Urban Issues. 2 Comments

While perusing CNN.com this afternoon, I came across an article called “Walking hard for many exercisers“.  My initial reaction was “that’s ridiculous… they’re just being lazy”.  Upon opening the article, I realized that my first impression was very wrong.  In fact, the article is about one of the more important tenets of good urbanism – sidewalks.  The reason walking is hard for people is not because they are too lazy, but rather because it’s just not safe or there’s nothing to walk to.

The article concentrates on Atlanta, where 1 in 4 people who want to exercise live in neighborhoods that do not have sidewalks.  It is unacceptable for any urban area to have any neighborhoods that lack sidewalks.  Now, Atlanta is a large sprawling southern city.  I imagine the neighborhoods being discussed in the article are in the outer sections of the city.  However, Atlanta is a modern city and should have sidewalks in all its neighborhoods.  In fact, the neighborhoods should have been planned so that they are all walkable areas with everything a resident could need within reasonable walking distance, generally defined as up to a 20 minute walk.

This article brings up a major issue.  The United States has an obesity problem.  Much of this problem is due to our automobile-centric lifestyle.  If cities and towns were planned and developed in a more urban nature (urban meaning dense, walkable development; not necessarily tall skyscrapers and no grass), obesity would probably not be as much of an issue.  In fact, it wasn’t until the 50′s and 60′s that suburban communities started to grow.  During this time, the public transit options decreased greatly (in part because the street cars were bought up by General Motors and replaced with buses and eventually those started to dwindle as more people owned cars).  If more communities and neighborhoods were planned and developed as walkable areas, the general health of the public would benefit greatly.  In addition to the health benefits, the environmental benefits would be great as well.  The less people use their cars to get everywhere, the less emissions and traffic there would be.

One of the issues of this is that many think of large highly populated urban areas when they think urban and walkable development.  However, that is not the case.  Some of the most walkable, most urban areas are small village centers in some of the smallest towns in the nation.  Small towns in New England, especially, have these characteristics.  Most of the older towns in the country were built so that the residents didn’t have to go very far to get what they needed and many of these communities still exist.  They should be emulated in any new development that occurs.  The suburban sprawl phenomenon is a big cause for the destruction of open space and for environmental issues.  It also causes people to get less exercise.