Adunblock Communities ..updated for clarity:
The idea is to form additional communities around a tool like AdBlock-Plus. Subscribing to exclusion filter lists that tell your browser which ads to disallow; as usual; but also subscribing to a whitelist of ads and servers that will be allowed through.
Communities could collectively maintain such lists, based on a set of criteria, also collectively arrived at.
The criteria could include things like:
• the type of ad , (text-only, no large downloads, no annoying animation)
• political / consumer activism (for example, only advertisers that behave well; with commitments to sustainability, global justice, workers rights.
• advertise within product ranges / what the community is interested in buying.
The community could ask for just the type of ads that interest that community (advertisers should be willing to jump through a few hoops for the right to have access to those strongly matched eyeballs)
• optional fund-raising / activism - where advertisers/adservers pay money to, or support in some way, organisations or a list of organisations, in order to be allowed on the whitelist.
Additional ideas / notes:
• The lists of course should be crowd sourced - using the numbers in the community to monitor for bad matched ads and to suggest products/ads/adservers that the community could include
• Communities manage themselves using the new online tools available for organising and arriving at consensus (wikis, forums, voting)
• Encourage forks/branches of communities / whitelists as required.
• Because community asks for just the type of ads that interest it, you know that whatever ads you see, are for products that are in line with your community's values, and that you can purchase with greater confidence.
• to join, someone would only have to subscribe to the appropriate whitelist
• participation should be under open principles
• a possible fundamental shift in the dynamics between consumer, producer and advertiser.
• effective consumer activism
• a community would decide to sell the right to be on its white-list to ad-servers that meet those criteria.
Then collectively decide on what the money advertisers pay to be on the white-list is used for.
more on adblocking ..
checkout Adblock and Adblock-Plus - already well working crowd sourced adblocking extensions - which by the way, is very usable in both firefox and chrome)
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any thoughts, comments ?
