I clicked through to an arti­cle on SeoChat.com called Is the Rec­i­p­ro­cal Link Dying a Slow Death? After yet another wave of link request spam this morn­ing (includ­ing sev­eral for “Christian-oriented web host­ing”, which proves they haven’t actu­ally ever read any of the sites they’re request­ing link exchanges with) I cer­tainly hope so, but I’ll leave that tirade for another day. Any­way, I was dis­turbed to see lit­tle boxes pop­ping up over cer­tain under­lined key­words — within the text of the arti­cle — and even more dis­turbed to find they were adver­tise­ments.

I realise that adver­tis­ing is nec­es­sary, but come on — surely this is over­do­ing it just a lit­tle? Nav­i­gat­ing through the arti­cle, I kept acci­dently mou­s­ing over them caus­ing more boxes to popup, obscur­ing what I was try­ing to read. Grrr. I tried click­ing on one — in Fire­fox I get two new win­dows, one with the web site that has bought the key­word, and another with the atti­cle index page on seochat. IE only brings up the advertiser’s site.

There’s also a lit­tle “What is this?” link which goes to a page describ­ing how and why seochat are assault­ing us with this annoy­ing, inva­sive adver­tis­ing. Blegh.

It’s all done with JavaScript. Which makes me wish that there was a Fire­fox exten­sion that let you dis­able JavaScript on a domain by domain basis. Hmmm… maybe I’ll go check out update.mozilla.org — maybe someone’s thought of that already…