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BoingBoing’s Image Ads Gone from Bloglines Feed? Yay!

I searched this out before posting, but I’m not that good at finding stuff like this. Maybe Bill Flitter at Pheedo would know about this - it’s his bread and butter.

I am almost completely sure that there were image ads carried in the Bloglines feed of BoingBoing at some point before today. I can recall them maybe 2 weeks ago, when I last checked.

Now they are gone. And I love it.

Why? Because of the content of those ads. I almost went so far as to blog about how much it irritated me to to see the decidedly borderline “Work Unsafe” Suicide Girls ads on the BoingBoing site. I rationalized that they gotta eat (both BB and SG), and I could just as easily read the feed with Bloglines and escape the ads. But my plan didn’t work — I still saw the same ads for the saucy vixens.

I thought about posting that I just didn’t think that mode of advertising is kosher for the kind of experience I want to have on BB or during my daily news crawl using Bloglines. But why take the trouble just to sound prurient, overly sensitive, and cranky-feminist? I just stopped reading BB and suffered through being a little less cool.

But it is worth the trouble to throw out an “atta-boy” - especially while these models are still developing (no pun on the SG chix was orig intended, but now I think it’s funny — even though most of them look my age). We all know that pR0n in all its forms sells, and SG is just a bit more defenisible because they’re part of the culture. But given how boy the culture is - having the most obviouys representation of female contrbution being some girl’s luscious cleavage is not a positive thing.

So I don’t know if this was something Mark Fletcher at Bloglines did, or if the folks at BoingBoing stopped it, or even if it is just a temporary glitch. Two thumbs up from me.

I have no idea what other feedback these guys have gotten, how extensive a debate this has been either internally or externally. I just know that I withheld my feedback, and just happened to notice you fixed the thing that had kept me away. This is a decent lesson in “take the feedback you receive seriously, because it likely represents the thoughts of a lot of people who don’t bother”.