No Triskets, Please I've posted before on how Internet advertising is corroding the separation between editorial and advertising that print journalists have long valued—ads that slightly impinge on a line of text, for example, so that in order to finish the sentence you were reading, you have no choice but to see the ad.

I hope that this is a passing phase, a sign of publishers' desperation to make money on the Web. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, the problem worsens. On Salon.com, I was just trying to read a story about how Rudy Giuliani has a priest accused of child molestation on his payroll, when an ad for Triskets suddenly appeared in the middle of the text, as if it were dropped from the top of the browser page. A trisket spun around, appeared with olive oil, then with cheese. And then it retreated back to the top of the screen. There was no "close" button you could hit; you just had to sit there and wait for the damn cracker to stop twirling around.

I now have no appetite for Triskets, nor for finishing the article I was reading. Instead, I feel like punching someone at Salon in the nose.

Pretty soon, these ads are going to become so commonplace and irritating that they actually discourage Web traffic....  ¶ 7:24 AM