On my daily trip to CNet.com, I discovered they have some new ads for Apple’s iPod Touch. Let’s check them out.

Upon visiting the site, the giant ad occasionally waits for you to press play and stays out of your way, but usually it does one of two things: disable the entire CNet navigation bar or automatically play, which also disables your navigation. Why does it disable your navigation? Because as the iPod Touch moves, so does the navigation bar. It swings around, flips out, rolls around, and so on. It’s quite cool, but it completely disables your navigation while it is running and sometimes disables it even before the ad starts.

In other words, depending on your flash version and luck, you might have to sit through about 15 seconds of watching stuff fly around the screen in an effort to pull your eyes to an ad.

There are basically two things wrong with this:

First, the implementation is horrid! Apparently this was never tested on older versions of Flash Player, where it disables the navigation until you press play and wait for it to finish. Also annoyingly, it seems to auto play sometimes, but not others. (And no, there was no obvious pattern to the auto play for me.)

Second, and more importantly, one ad that messes with the rest of your page is fine, but as soon as everyone starts doing this, you’ll never be able to do anything online again. Yep, the iPod will be swinging down in to what you are trying to read, while the dancing cowboys will be following your cursor, while the flashing winner dialog will be creating ripples in the middle of the text, while an ad for glasses will be randomly rearranging words. Is that what Web 3.0 means?

These ads should not be allowed on to any website until they actually (a) work correctly and (b) wait for you to press play. I visit CNet every day and this is going to get old really fast. This is a straight up issue of consumer choice. If these ads annoy people, they will go elsewhere for their content. It’s as hard as typing a couple letters into that box. If your going to put ads over content, you might as well throw out the content.

One ad may be a curiosity, but twenty will not be. Don’t wait for it to get there. Apple may think it’s a good idea. I recommend you think different.