Thinking Ahead
I decided to check out the headlines on most major portals and news sites. On the front of MSN is an ad for Halo 2 and the soundtrack for it. Looks cool so I click it (hey, ads aren’t always evil). It takes me to a press release like page for some information about the Halo 2 soundtrack. There’s a button there that says “hear the first song”, even better. So I click again. What a good little sheep I am. I wind up back on MSN, in their movies section on a page about Halo 2’s soundtrack. On there is a link to listen to ‘Blow Me Away’ by Breaking Benjamin, looks good, let’s click again. Windows Media Player pops up and lets me know there’s a problem with my sound/video device. Odd, I’m not doing anything else on the machine, what could it be? I think, I click again to make sure it wasn’t Outlook receiving new mail and setting off the new mail sound alert. Nope, still an error. So I stare - and there it is. Right on that same web page is an ad for The Polar Express. There’s a small video going within the ad. The sound’s not on by default, which I’m usually very happy about as I don’t care for ads with sound; but because this was playing on a page which really has little purpose other than to listen to this song, I received my error. I have no tricky setup on this machine, I would imagine most people who visit are going to run into this conflict. These types of problems should really be found during some sort of QA process. I mean, if you’re going to have sound/video on a page, don’t have a multimedia ad there that can load first and conflict with it.
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