How Bad Luck and Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize (2011)

That "special offer for 20 copies of discover magazine" hovering monstrosity has to be the most offensively oversized ad I have ever seen on a link submitted to this site.

I'm not running any ad blockers, but I didn't see the ad. I even went to the site to see if I'd missed it through ads blindness, but I couldn't find it.

Firefox on Linux, for the record.

if you copy the url into an incognito browser you can see it if you really want to.

Agreed. That was one of the worst sites I've ever seen in terms of percent of content visible. I couldn't even read the entire first sentence without closing ads and scrolling.

Around 40% of my view was header and navigation, another 25% ads, another 25% "social" junk, and maybe %10 for the headline and part of the first sentence of the story.

Needless to say, I didn't bother trying to read the article.

I agree, not a million miles from this: http://www.lingscars.com/

Took me a minute to realize I'd already fixed the site via stylebot: http://stylebot.me/styles/7761

But yeah, annoying.

Is that for real?

Ling Valentine was the keynote speaker at The Future of Digital Marketing 2012. Basically, her site is built to be emotionally engaging, personally branded, and completely different from what you'd expect from a car site. She attracts customers who don't want to deal with a traditional car dealer because of their reputation.

Video of her talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI#t=535

Yeah, I actually did a little digging, and to make a very unoriginal comment, the site appears to be un-ironic.

That said, my first and last desire is to close tab and flee screaming. But if it works for her ...

"Reputation" is ... hardly what I'd see being established in a good way by that site though.

One observation: her site is very strongly reminiscent of many native Kanji sites (I'm slightly more familiar with Japanese and Korean than Chinese websites), which lack a number of the typical signifiers of emphasis which are found in Western / Roman characterset communications. The result is an interface that's typically exceptionally loud. Ling's site is in many ways a direct transliteration of that design motif to English.