Hate pop-ups? So does the guy who made them! 

Ethan Zuckerman worked for the webpage hosting site Tripod.com from 1994 to 1999, when it was struggling to develop a revenue model. “Along the way,” he writes in The Atlantic this week, “we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.”

The pop-up ad started as a solution to a complaint from a car maker upset that its banner ad was running on a page containing sexual content. “It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content,”  Zuckerman wrote the code to launch ads in separate windows, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the Web’s biggest nuisances. “I’m sorry. Our intentions were good. Read more. . .

Recently spotted by The Wall Street Journal, Twitter is experimenting with a new way to explain popular hashtags.

The images below show Twitter, for iOS, defining certain hashtags in search in an obvious attempt to notch up reader comprehension.

A few examples are #oitnb (Orange is the New Black), #manutd (Manchester United), and #rt (Russia Today), which I guess that last one has some merit, and only a select few people have the feature.

What do you think? Do you have astronomical hashtag comprehension or could you use the help? Read more. . .