Cisco Not Done With Social Spending

Agreed. I tend to subconsciously ignore all ads on the page, but it was still somewhat irritating. IMHO, the content was readworthy enough to bear the ads and horrid design however. Wonder why Cisco thinks buying a collection of semi-related (at best) social networks will make them consumer centric.

lol! Here is a nice dissection of ads I did for another site cluttered with them:

http://shuzak.com/img/Temporary/SpammingUsers.jpg (The ads are highlighted in green)

An excerpt from an article I wrote on user experience that seems relevant here:

"One thing I particularly dislike about Web 2.0 startups is their Web 1.0 approach towards displaying advertisements. It shouldn't take an Einstein to realize where Google ads are appropriate and where they are not...Note that there is nothing wrong with displaying ads as long as it makes sense to do so. If you have no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If you have too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

It is unfortunate that nearly every social network spam's their own users with unwanted ads. The users are less likely to notice advertisements as the frequency of ads increases within a site. Even worse, because the users are so used to seeing ads popup, they might ignore them even when they do make sense [6]. Usability should always be prioritized over revenues. When a user chooses to spend 20 minutes of their life on your website, they could be spending that time anywhere else, but they chose your site. Don't reward their loyalty with spam [7]."