Jason Kolb asks in Life after ads which kind of advertising would the readers block. I wanted to point a different axis of categories to clasify advertising.

I agree that “push ads” are way more annoying than “pull ads”, but this is not the primary axis I’m using to block ads. I block ads using the energy they make me spend, be it electricity or attention span or overload. I’m actually more grateful to flashblock than to adblock plus, but both help a lot to save battery in my laptop, or else to prevent the global warming :) . I saw that recent firefox+nspluginwrapper (for 64-32 bits bridging of crap proprietary flash plugin) stops animations when their viewport is no longer visible. I like this a lot, more energy savings. Flash block has the goodie that I can activate flashlets one by one. Its only minus is that, once I do it, I can’t deactivate them without closing the tab.

Another category of annoying ads are those depleting cognitive energy instead of plain electrons: I mean the very annoying flashy and jumpy graphics. Those too are taken care by adblock plus + flash block. I guess I’ll install noscript one of these days to complete the job.

Actually, I de-activated from adblock plus the rules forbidding Google ads, and I will do the same for any company that proves me that their ads are both environmentally and culturally conscious, i.e. that they will not misuse my electricity or my visual/auditive cortex.

The good news is that apart from saving the world and my brain, I’m getting about double battery time that I used to get three months ago. And more screen real state. A good portion of the merit goes to the powertop people. They have pushed patches and generally raised awareness on power savings, though mental power savings have actually been my personal fight, I’d say. I said a long time ago, in my Spanish blog, that advertising is cyberspace’s toxic waste, and I’m acting to avoid the really toxic ones.