Oversized ads are getting on my nerves...

I don't know if this is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of media advertising or not, but about ten times this week alone I've already ran into annoying advertisements preventing me from reading my news at online sites.

These "in your face" ads first started to bother me while I was at work, where I am constantly clicking on media sites. I work at washingtonpost.com as an intern in their politics section every morning and one of my responsibilities is to update the Web site either by text linking, writing for their campaign 2006 page, or just reading the news. But every time I clicked on a link an annoying full screen ad would pop up and not let me close it until it finished flashing or spinning or whatever it was doing.

Even my boss was annoyed while he was clicking away and said to me, "I guess they pay the bills." And that's very true - advertisers do want to be in your face to get your attention and have the ability to do so and a good amount of exposure on news sites where you have a specific demographic checking in each day, but I'm still not sold on if this is a good idea or not. At least in print, or even online before they started popping up in my face, I had the choice of whether or not I wanted to look at an ad and I was able to let things I was interested in looking at catch my eye instead of having it thrust in front of me.

And at first I just thought it was washingtonpost.com that was letting their advertising take over their site, but then the same thing happened to me again later that afternoon when I was browsing around USAToday.com. A large ad popped up with a bullfrog on a lily pad and I don't even know it was for, but I knew that I wasn't interested.

I don't know if it's just me, but these ads don't do anything for me. They don't make me want to sign up for a Citibank credit card or purchase a new ipod. They are more an annoyance than an eye catcher and I can't wait to click and close them out.

But one interesting thing that comes to mind when I see these ads is last class when we went to archive.org and looked at the way back machine to see newspaper sites from the '90s or even early 2000s when ads were nothing more than immobile, boring looking boxes on the screen. While it's interesting to see how far media advertising has come - from when they were small icons on the 1998 Los Angeles Times Web site to today when they are multimedia, full-colored, large ads, it makes me wonder if advertising on media Web sites has gone too far? Are our news sites primarily news sources or are they just about the ads? What do you think...

A way to get around copyright?

Before this blog was even up and running I had problems with copyright law. Professor King said on our first night in class that we each had to create our own blog so we could discuss online media issues and all I thought about was the visuals I wanted my blog to have. Nice colors, pretty fonts and lots of complementing photos. Blogging about Katie Couric? Nice, I could put a cute picture of her from usatoday.com to go alongside my post. But wait - is there a copyright on that photo? Am I legally allowed to use it on my blog? Doesn't everyone just steal everything off the Internet anyway? What's the big deal?

I've run into this before - I work for the student newspaper The GW Hatchet and last year for the Student Association elections one of the candidates copied one of the photos of him from the paper and used it for his flyers around campus. He ended up violating copyright law and had to pay us a pretty hefty fee for using it. After that I realized how serious copyright violations could be. This kid had to pay hundreds of dollars because he didn't take it seriously, or maybe he didn't even know about it.

But it's all about getting the credit that is due. In my mind, copyright became serious for people in my generation after file sharing systems like Napster and people who downloaded from them started getting sued for downloading free music from the Internet and therefore hurting the artist's profits. Copyright is everywhere in the U.S. - from movies to music to news stories to photos and what if you want to watch, listen, read or look at any of these? You have to pay the price. No wonder someone started a non-profit to make things easier on both the originator and the person who wants to use their work.

Creative Commons is a great compromise for people in my generation that have grown up using computers. We want to download everything and don't expect to have to pay. Creative Commons has found a compromise, which is exactly what we need. According to their Web site, the organization allows copyrigh holders to grant some of their rights to the public while keeping others through a variety of licensing schemes. Creative Commons saw that there was a demand for sharing online files without cost and sought to eliminate the problem. I think it's a great solution. What do you think?