10 Major Internet Irritations

I was checking Yahoo mail the other day, and those dancing, jiggling blue men advertising insurance or God knows what irritated me so much I thought I'd scream. I started to wonder how many Net users were like me: annoyed at times to the point of thinking Internet advertising is the spawn of Satan. Don't you just wish you could clobber the person who put that on the Web or at least punch out the image?

I started making a mental list of Internet Annoyances - things like the maniacal blue silhouettes. Pretty soon I decided to see if there were others as irked as I about these things.

Of course there were. Some people have started blogs and created websites about their pet grievances. Here's what someone thinks are the 10 Most Irritating Words on the Web.

Sanchit Mittal has a blog listing what he finds Most Irritating and asks you to add to his list.

For David Louis Edelman Gmail is his bugaboo. I don't use Gmail much, for the same reasons he cites.

Now, I'm not really focused on individual words, although a few like folksonomy would probably be on my list of banned words, especially after I had to do some intensive research on the subject of folksonomy in order to write intelligently about it. Here's my list, in no particular order.

Email & Web Nuisances

1. Smiley faces that wink and dance around when you're trying to read an email.

2. Any use of the word BLOOK, meaning a book based on a blog.

3. People who write web content who know neither basic grammar nor have the ability to spell correctly. Needless to say, they also lack the common sense to have their written content proofread and corrected by someone who does know punctuation and spelling.

4. Websites that bombard you with music when you visit them. Now, I'm a music lover of just about every genre, but I cringe when I visit an author's site for the first time and a big band version of "Sentimental Journey" or some New Age non-music blares at me. If you want music on your site, put a button where the visitor can click to hear, not click to turn the ear-splitting whatever off.

5. Websites with a Flash intro where you have to click to enter the site. These portals may seem moody or artsy to you, but most Web denizens hate doorway sites. Plus, web crawlers won't visit so you'll rank low in PageRank, not what you want.

6. Animation on a web page. People use animation to draw attention to something or to demo or to entertain. Unfortunately, most animation is irritating in the extreme. Who wants to try to read with something blinking on and off fast enough to cause a grand mal seizure? Whether the animation is a klutzy cartoony gif or a sophisticated piece of Flash, get rid of it.

7. Pop up ads. Thankfully, pop up blockers are usually effective but some still slip by.

8. Pop over ads make me want to scream. That's what you call those that have certain words underlined in an article so if you mouse over them, the ad springs up. I hate trying to read an article with those nuisances popping up to obscure the text at every line. I'm sure most are like me and just move on rather than staying to read.

9. Pop overs that instantly start some video clip playing. Not only does it bog your machine down, but also it's usually not something you came to the site for in the first place, so you move on.

10. Registration sites where you have to mouse select and click the state. Why can't they all just let you type in the 2 letter state abbreviation?

Okay, that's my list. At least for today. What's on your top 10 hate list?