I think he's got some good points there, specifically as to what advertising is when you boil it all away. It's an interruption wanting to sell us one thing when we're in the middle of doing something else. This is true. When you go to Needcoffee, there's a better than average chance you're probably not wanting to see an ad for singles dating service. So there's been a huge mismatch between what might be relevant for you to see vs. what you're actually seeing. I think this happens better online than it does in the real world–in "real life," I would constantly be amazed at the offers I'd receive via snail mail. For example, a special deal on replacing the siding on my house–while I was living in an apartment. It just takes a little bit of checking to know that my address was an apartment at the time–and yet here I was getting mail about an offer I simply could not use.

The internet knows where you are just by your IP, so I'm assuming you're not seeing the same ads I am in some instances. But still, it's not working the way it should. So while I agree with some of the author's ideas in that article, I think the answers are a little simpler and less advertisageddonish.

1. Advertising needs to quit being fucking annoying. Yes, I know some people are annoyed by ads on websites. Some sites proudly state that they're ad-free. Some sites give me shit because I have advertising. But believe me, I tried a donation model and it didn't work. And Amazon sales and other affiliations pay, but not enough by themselves. And I have enough traffic where I need a real server, and somebody's got to pay for that. So hence: advertising. If I thought there was a better way, I would certainly utilize it. And hell, if you can figure out a way to convince people to pay a dollar a month to get free access to Needcoffee–tell me. Because I've got enough readers where I would be in great shape. I don't have Boing Boing-level readers, but we do okay.

The trouble comes when advertising gets annoying. Because then it makes every site look bad. Pop-ups? Bad. Those flash pop-ups that sprawl themselves out between you and the content you came to see until you take an action? Ridiculous. Pop-unders? Baffling. Has anybody actually come across a pop-under that you didn't realize had even opened, looked at it and done anything that would make the advertiser any money? Ever? Or did you just close it. Think about it: somebody paid to annoy the shit out of you and make you not want to buy their product. Is it any wonder online advertising is supposed to be dying? It deserves to die if it's that dumb.

I don't allow any of that nonsense on Needcoffee. I was using these video ads that looked like they might do all right–then the company in question altered their code so that it had to auto-play with the sound up and didn't warn anybody it was happening. So they're gone. My rule is to not allow anything on my site that would piss me off were it in use on someone else's site.

But bottom line: online advertising needs to actually advertise and not annoy.

2. Clickthroughs make even less sense now than they did before. Ken and I have had this discussion in the past. You don't click through a magazine ad. You don't click through a billboard. And for most of television's existence, you haven't clicked through a commercial. But yet those spots were paid for. Why should sites not be paid to simply have an ad appear? If there's an ad on Needcoffee that reminds you a movie is coming out this weekend you want to see, and you go snag a ticket without clicking through…I should provide that service to the advertiser for free? It makes no sense.

3. Online ads need to take a clue from television ads. When television advertising started realizing that nobody really needed it around anymore, it started to change. Television commercials wanted your attention but you were no longer, thanks to stuff like TiVo, bound to give it to them. So what did the smart companies do? Make amusing advertisements. Make commercials you would actually want to watch. How many viral videos in the last month you watched were actually just really good commercials? I've probably seen more commercials in the past year that I have in the last ten, because somebody sends it to me as a viral thing online.

Online ads need to be funny, weird, and engaging. I can't think of a single banner or square ad or anything that I've thought, "What the hell is this?" and clicked because it looked like something fun or entertaining. If anything it's just some product that I was interested in anyway, and so I clicked through. But the ad did nothing to sell me on the product. People don't have to look at ads on websites, much less click through. And if they have no incentive to, whether informative or entertaining, they simply won't.

And here's the thing as well, as a coda. I'm not saying I love having advertising on my sites. But until I get that dollar a month from a substantial number of my readers, I have to have something to pay the bills and keep the lights on. I encourage anybody with a bright idea to tell me about it.

Okay, another coda thing. We're all getting acclimated to craploads of distractions now. Your computer, your phone, your Facebook, your e-mail, your Twitter, your whatever-whatever. We're juggling all kinds of crap. This sort of mentality–easily distracted and expecting to be distracted–just seems to me to be ripe for some quality ads that catch the eye. We're all easily distracted by shiny objects and we've decided to pitch our tents in a shiny object factory.

When is somebody going to take advantage of this? Cough. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out once more that my rates are reasonable.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

My problem is this–and this is what sparked this particular rant: I run Outlook 2007. Yes, I know, I shouldn't. I know Microsoft is Satan and Apple is oh so much better and whatever whatever yeah right okay. In Realitysburg, though, I know Thunderbird would make a great alternative, but after most of a day trying to get all the add-ins and plug-ins that it would take to get Thunderbird to work with my IMAP setup (if you don't know what that is, trust me, you don't want or need to know), I gave up. I'm not completely technically inept, I just have shit to do, you know?

So I'm sticking with Outlook. Trouble is, I can't search for my e-mails easily.

There's the built-in Windows Search, but it's terrible. And that's when it's working. My problem is that you let it index until the cows come home and it won't finish. This is a problem that affects many and the only responses I've seen to it are: have you waited long enough to let it finish or rebuild your Outlook file. So it might as well be a flash-frozen ferret in a bun for all the good it's doing me on finding this audiobook e-mail request I have filed somewhere.

There's Google Desktop. It's fantastic when it works–like most things from Google. But it opens the e-mail, once found, in Firefox. And when you click "View in Outlook," the damn thing just sits there. There's this fix, which doesn't work for me. And then there's just repairing Office, which doesn't fix it either. So that's even worse because it's teasing me with an e-mail that I can't do a damn thing with in Firefox. "Do you want to forward this? Reply to it? Even just view it in the program we pulled it from? Well, good luck with that."

(Sidebar: Yes, I could use Gmail. But Gmail needs to stop the whole forced threaded conversations nonsense. I'm tired of e-mails that I deleted or moved being attached to a new message just because Gmail thinks it's one conversation–and then I can't unattach them.)

There's Xobni. It looks friendly enough, but its privacy policy is vague enough to be scary and I uninstalled it pretty rapidly. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you," remember.

So my free idea is this: somebody figure out how to fix this crap. Seriously. I know that's easy for me to say, because while not technically inept I can't code my way out of a paper bag unless there's a way to do it in HTML or PHP. But I'm thinking there's got to be some open source Mozilla-esque search that will simply work, index everything and then not tell anybody what you've got on your machine. And I don't know about you, but I'd pay $5 a month or something just to get access to a plugin or program that would shave minutes off of me looking around for my e-mails. The car key plugin can come later.

But if you know of one already, please let me know. Because this combing through e-mails is getting silly. It's 2009 for God's sake.

Here's my one tip for people who need these articles: you're either not cut out to be a serious ("serious" defined however you like) blogger or you're not blogging about stuff you're passionate about. You're trying to talk about the wrong stuff.

If you're passionate about something, you'll never run out of things to say about it. Unless it's the most narrow subject matter ever. The mating habits of naked mole rats, for example. I could probably not write about that subject for more than a few days. But then again, I'm not passionate about naked mole rats. The naked mole rat expert from Fast, Cheap… could probably blog his ass off about them, though.

I mean seriously: I have a huge backlog of posts I want to do for Needcoffee that aren't done for lack of time. Because I'm passionate about pop culture, which might be sad, but blogging brings out the sad damn-i-need-a-life in all of us.

If you're blogging just for you–which is basically what I do on here–then yeah, blog whenever the mood strikes you. But if you're really trying to do Something ("Something" defined however you like) with your blog and you're getting writer's block, well…other folks might try and dress it up and make you feel good, but I'll give it to you straight. Either take a long, hard look at your tactics and change them up, or just face up to the fact that it's a hobby.

Anyway, here's what he was complaining about: tucking away songs that you don't want because they are tied to a particular event. Xmas, for example.

Real simple. It helps if you have everything tied with a genre like "Xmas" or "Holiday" or something.

Select all the songs you wish to tuck away somewhere else. Then right click and "Get Info" on all of them. Change the album to "Xmas Tunes" or whatever you want to call it, and make sure you check that this IS a compilation.

Now…go to your compilations folder, grab that Xmas Tunes folder and move it wherever you want it. Then just go back into iTunes and delete the songs from your library. When it becomes time to celebrate our favorite "reformed" pagan holiday, just throw the songs back into your library. Done.

Now, if you don't have everything fixed with a genre, then just use my previous tip about using stars to mark things needing action, and if you come across "Jingle Bells" when you shouldn't, mark it with the right amount of stars and then deal with it when you get home.

As to the comments on 43 Folders: I had to register, fill in my personal info, do a captcha, then wait for my password to show up. Then I put the password in and was told that I was denied access to the comment form after all that. No error messages. No whoops, you did something wrong. Just nada.

If I ever put in place a scheme so user-unfriendly as that bullshit, please promise me one of you will call me on it, okay?

And while I absolutely agree in the concept of equal time for all candidates, I think the solution to this is to give exactly what is called for: equal time.

Comedy Central should be willing to provide a timeslot for a satirical talk show that any candidate is welcome to host, as long as he does so in character.

Same thing with Fred Thompson. Any candidate should be given a show on NBC where they play a D.A. There's enough cop shows where this would be possible. Hell, you could almost do that with Law & Orders.

See? Problem solved. Somebody pay me.

Now that Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares has hit America, it's time to take that concept and mix it with the success of The God Delusion, Root of All Evil? and others.

Thus, I submit to you:

Richard Dawkins' Atheist Nightmares.

Each week, Richard goes 'round to see if he can help budding atheists make that final leap and shed their unneeded belief systems.

Think about it:

Gordon convinces folks to use local produce; Richard convinces folks to find local groups that non-believe like they non-believe.

Gordon gets cooks to clean up their kitchens, which half the time are filthy; Richard gets people to tidy up their belief systems, basically showing them that they don't actually believe half of what they think they believe.

Gordon snaps people out of their culinary doldrums with tough love; Richard snaps people out of their spiritual doldrums with tough logic.

He's not converting the unwilling, mind you. It's just really hard to shed a belief system–take it from somebody who knows.

I think it would be a smash hit. Somebody pay me.

Anyway, the Terminator gets hosed up in transit or something and has to rebuild itself from available tech, so you get this bizarre steampunk Terminator chasing people across the American West. For all I know, Dark Horse already published this same story five years back. If not: free idea, just because I want to read it and don't have time for it to be in my head.