Your advertising makes me think you hate me.

I think hatred is a strong word. Most advertising is simply brain-dead. Most marketers are Internet-clueless. Mainstream sites (who ought to know better) are the worst offenders. The people handling ad inventory for mainstream sites (cough cough NYT YouTube Huffington CNN cough cough) should simply be fired and repeatedly beaten with a rubber chicken.

Encourage people to:

- Use an adblocker (always). Never turn it off for any reason.

- Use plugins like Readability.

- Prefer RSS feeds to front pages (less ads)

- Shun and avoid sites that carry obnoxious advertising

- When you come across a piece of advertising obnoxious enough to make you angry, send the site owner an email. These emails matter. Site owners obsess over them.

We want to get to a point where the ads-for-content business model is broken. If your company (let alone your personal blog) can't figure out how to create useful, compelling content with tasteful advertising, your company doesn't deserve a place in the new market.

One more thing: if you ever see a site that uses double-underlined hyperlinks that spawn an obnoxious floating popup dialog from hell on hover, simply navigate away without reading another word. No legitimate content provider uses this hellishly offensive advertising form, and authors who use it deserve not to be read.