The Myth of the Muttering Madman is a project in self-realization.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Flash advertising with sound on smh.com.au?!

My God!

This is so annoying. smh.com.au has started using a flash ad which plays an intrusive "glass breaking" sound.

The shockwave file is played in a loop, so you could be busy trying to concentrate on a Java implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm listening to some soothing music by Nick Drake, with a smh page open in a Firefox tab somewhere and you'd be constantly bombarded by a low quality sound byte of shattering glass. What the hell? Are these guys serious?

My God - it drives me mad. Who decided it would be a great idea to draw people's attention to some advertising by placing sound in a flash ad? Who do they think they are - a GeoCities site circa 1997?

This is the offending flash file in question. Thank god for ad blocking Firefox extensions.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I use a custom CSS User Stylesheet which attaches to smh.com.au and turns multi-page articles into single-page and hides the Ads... among other things.

snarkyboojum said...

I'm pleased to announce that the sound seems to have been taken out of this flash file :)

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