The following is one of my favorite passages from World of Ends
Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages — their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read — will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web’s architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you." ["World of Ends" Searls and Weinberger. 10 Mar 2003]Too true, too true, and too true. Another virtue of being on a non-Windows platform is that the degree of annoying in-page advertising is substantially lower. And with pop-up blocks in place, the web's generally a pretty good place to be. But step away from all of that, and it all comes across as a shock. It's pretty hard to read the weather with little purple pills crawling around blocking all of the temperature and forecast information. How far are we from the omnipresent highly personalized-and-everywhere advertising seen in films like Minority Report?