My friend Drew recently showed me a cool Firefox Plug-in called Add-art. If you install Add-art, like magic, all the ads (well, most of them), will disappear. Everybody knows how stupid ads are, and how stupid they can make you. So… get smart and install Add-art.
Add-art is a great idea, and I was pleased to see that it’s an open source project (meaning you can see the code of the project, and contribute if you want). I would like to get involved somehow, but I’m really limited on time these days, so I will just contribute my criticism:
Add-art seems to be a intermediate step in the evolution of blocking ads. The evolution of Ad-Replacement goes like this: First, there was the internet. Then, man realizes that he can make a lot of money off ads in web sites. Next, man puts ads on every square pixel of web sites. Man who goes to web site becomes annoyed. Man wants to block ads. Developers make plug-ins that block ads. Man is not so annoyed anymore. Then projects like Add-art (or some clever guy) comes along and says “let’s replace the ads with something cool, like art”. This makes man pretty happy.
But…. if only man new how truly happy he could be…
In the current state of Ad-Replacement (illustrated by Add-Art.org), the advertisements are replaced with the “current show”, which is currently Hiroshige’s Japanese Prints (yes, Hiroshige’s prints are wonderful). So, the formula for replacing ads seems simple enough: find where the ads are, replace them with the current installation. It’s basically virtual curating on the ad space.
I started brainstorming this morning, and I came up with the next evolution of Ad-Replacement. I won’t pretend that I’m the first person to come up with this, but as far as I’m aware, I am. I started to imagine a graffiti artist, or muralist, or any other kind of artist, and how they interact with the real world. I’m really big on making the virtual environment reflect our natural environment, that way we don’t have to learn anything new (winks). For example, how does a graffiti artist interact with the real world? Well, he sees an ad that sucks, and he spray paints, or wheat pastes over it. Pretty simple. You can see where I’m going with this. Ad-Replacement should reflect this.
Without going too far into detail, I’d propose some features to the Add-art community, or anybody else who is developing a tool like this. Some are pretty ambitious, others would be simple to implement (i think). I’ll start off with the least complex.
- The art that appears in place of the crappy ads should link the artist featured, to related info, or maybe even whatever the artist chooses.
-More artists.
-New young, inspiring, important, never-seen-before artists. In the current state, we are simply getting other static content. Sure, most people would rather see Hiroshige (and others) rather than a blacked out ad, but more people would rather see current, active, popular artist. I think this could inspire an online scene.
-Allow people to see what installations are being viewed, and how many times. Here a person can vote on what galleries they like, change their current gallery, upload their own gallery, vote on particular images that are being displayed in galleries. Here, and artist can submit his image to be considered in a gallery that is already being displayed, or that will be displayed in the future.
-Seamlessly be able to manage your installations either within the plug-in or via membership to a virtual ‘gallery’.
- People / Artists should be able to upload their art to a database, where it would be considered by a community for use in a feature installation. Why use old art? Why use art that people have seen a trillion times? We’d basically be extending a boring office calendar. I don’t see any functionality like this, and it would be a major step in a project like this taking off.
- Context specific content. Is this possible? If I’m on NY Time’s site, Hiroshige’s Japanese Prints (as beautiful as they are), don’t really have much to do with the news. What if, for example, a photo journalist could upload his photos of the war, or some other newsworthy item? This would be great. After all, I didn’t go to new york times to look at, let’s say Van Gogh’s sunflowers. My friend Drew said it would be hard to do this because it would be hard to track the particular ‘id’ of each photo. I don’t think it would be hard, since we don’t need to track the photos unique id. All we have to know is that there is an ad image, and that it’s on the NY Times web site. With those two piece of information, we can have context specific, dynamic material.
-”Tag over this image” (when I say ‘tag’, i mean tagging, as in graffiti). Imagine if you could right click on any image on the web, and replace it with any image of your choice on the fly? Of course, if you wanted others to see it, it would have to be voted on, or approved, and possibly replaced by somebody else if their image was “better”. This would add a competitive element to the process, which, in my opinion, would create more interesting graphics on the web, and create more interest in plug-ins of this nature.
-Lastly and most ambitiously: A artists tool pallet. What if you could drag and drop images from a palette, or even use a ’spray paint’ tool to tag over an image in the place that it currently is? That would be awesome! This would be a difficult thing to implement, but I don’t think that it’s impossible. Especially with the advancements of DHTML and Ajax. The functionality is simple enough, you select the spray paint tool, click and draw something on an image in it’s place, then click save or something, and the new image is uploaded to the database for consideration. Or, you could set your plug-in to ‘tagger mode’, where anything goes. Then you could start a crew, and try to out-do other crews. If they tag over your tagging, you would see it immediately. The whole internet would become a virtual turf war for graffiti artists. This is the way it is in the real world, so I imagine that ‘tagger mode’ would be appealing to a lot of people.
One thing that crossed my mind when thinking about context specific Ad-Replacement was “why should we stop at replacing ads?” Well, there is no reason. We should allow the tools to track other images as well, like well known sites that get millions of hits, sites that hardly ever change their layout. Google.com for example. Their famed http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif image would be a hotspot for aspiring graphic design artists.
I have much more ideas, and can go into further detail about any of these ideas. I have the entire interfaces for this plans all worked out in my head, for example. My plan is to send a message to the add-art.org community to see if I could get any feedback. I plan on responding here at piratepony.com to any feedback on these initial ideas. Thanks for reading.
However, Helio Display come a long way from the M1 model to the M3 model. The M3 must be a 100% improvement as far as resolution / image quality. It’s funny, as you watch the video on the M3 model, first is displayed a skull spinning around in circles, then a bunch of pharmaceuticals, falling from the sky silver dollars. Death and drugs, two hot products in 2008. I prefer the girl in the jumper <---.
