Jiggling Baloney

Annoying twitchy things on Web pages, a.k.a. Dancing Spam.

Product of years of research into graphics, networks, and human-machine interface theory.

Who exactly thought animated GIFs would be a good idea?

On the Web? The same people who brought us the blink tag?

Marketing. You look at them, so they work.

Actually, we don't look at them. We've learned to ignore anything animated on Web pages. Even children have learned to ignore Web animations. See http://www.pantos.org/ts/papers/wkutw/, found via http://www.useit.com.

: That study is bogus. See MeatballWiki at http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WhenKidsUseTheWeb. Besides, the much better StanfordPoynterProject (http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?StanfordPoynterProject) states otherwise, and they used eyetracking headgear to really find out where surfers fix their attention. -- SunirShah

[Umm... isn't that the same kind of motion we learn to ignore when we have an air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror? You know -- so that we "never saw" that car (or worse yet, motorcycle) that pulled out from the side street?]

Brought to you by the same people that decided some jerk screaming at you worked universally best for used car commercials.

Yes but just because we look at them doesn't mean we click on them. The click-through rate on banner ads has hovered under 1% for some time now. Oh but DoubleClick and Akamai don't want you to know that. The marketing is all about "targeted" ads, which means that DoubleClick wants to give you a cookie and use that to track where you go (among all the sites they serve ads for) and supposedly pass out banner ads based on this data. -- StevenNewton

Animated GIFs (and other animation techniques) aren't necessarily bad things. I've seen sites where they are used to convey information. For example, Sun's demo Java applet that graphically shows how an array is being sorted with varying algorithms was first seen as an animated GIF. Another (small) example was one site that used animation to show information flow around a process. As a static image, the process was confusing, but the animation helped show the flow. Look around on the Web, and you're likely to find other worthwhile examples.

As usual, it's not the technology that is bad, but its application. Back when television was first being discussed, they had grand visions of using it for education. And while today we do have many educational uses of television, we also have "World's Greatest Car Chases VII" and people selling magnetic shoe insoles.

-- JohnPassaniti

They make static and slow moving pages calm enough to pore over, but the contextually correct ones are of course the goal. -- PCP

I noticed that Mozilla can filter out pictures that didn't come from the same site as the page you're viewing. Would that feature suppress some of the banner ads?

Probably not, unless it distinguished between third level domains on the same site. (e.g. slashdot.org, images.slashdot.org). It would filter out most pictures on WikiWiki.

It does... you can actually just disable images on a domain by domain basis as well.