Intellitext Gets In Users' Way

It's a beautiful Saturday morning. A beautiful one that unfortunately, has been taken by annoyance.

I preface this by saying ads are necessary and good for sites. They help pay the bills. But don't have them annoy users, or masquerade as actual links, violating usability principles.

Intellitext, a service that populates pages with ads but as inline links in the content as opposed to an ad bar, might just be one of the biggest user annoyances.

I was on Softpedia (I linked to a page with these ads in it) looking for widgets (I need an alarm clock, and found one I like in Flip Clock) and what do I see but a page with a sea of links. And when I roll over them, these annoying ad boxes pop up (and in general don't go away). I look, and it's Intellitext.

I've seen them on other sites; I see them more and more now. And all I have to say is, yuck. It crowds the page, shouts ads on me if I make one mistake of mousing over it, doesn't go away when I mouse away, and is generally annoying.