I subscribe to several magazines and am fed up with opening one up to have inserts fall all over the place. I collected the inserts from some of my magazines this month and tallied them up: 18 total inserts from 4 magazines (average of 4.5/mag). Wired was the worst offender with 5 inserts, 4 of them placed on top of each other on the same page.

If I’m already paying to receive a publication, why should I have to deal with these annoying ads asking me to subscribe? I’m already a subscriber… and an agitated one.

Publishers generate a decent number of new subs from the inserts in existing subscribers’ magazines. Eliminating these inserts would cost them money. Plus, some think it would be difficult to separate subscriber’s issues from newstand issues when printing and binding.

To offset these costs, I would be willing to pay a 10% premium to not get inserts. Would you be willing to cough up some extra dough to avoid these pesky ads?

Many companies are interested in wringing more dollars out of online advertising through profiling and more accurately targeting users. Two weeks ago, an ISP in Kansas was caught spying on the web surfing habits of 26,000 customers in an effort to profile users. I and many others are very opposed to this due to the privacy implications and the fact that we don’t want our online activities being tracked.

However, I’ve begun to rethink whether targeted advertising is a good idea, thanks to the ads on Twitterrific. When I decided to try Twitterrific I had the intention of buying the ad-free version if I liked it enough. I love Twitterrific but I don’t plan to make this purchase because, can you believe it, I actually like the ads.

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With the recent acquisition of The Weather Channel by NBC, I am hoping there are some positive changes coming to Weather.com. The site, given its domain name, is the dominant website for checking the weather. Yet, the site presents a poor user experience, hides the good content and absent-mindedly focuses on unneeded services. Below I’ll highlight what bugs me the most and suggest some improvements.

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