[OSM-talk] advertising

[David Earl]

My first reaction on seeing the home page today was 'what's that strange 
blue blob in the middle'? Hovering over it on IE7 I see it says 'homes 
for sale in Banstead' and my first reaction was 'someone's hacked the 
home page'. It doesn't even give the hover-prompt in Firefox, just a 
blob, until you click on it. But then it dawned on me that this is the 
advertising Steve mailed about last week.

I think it is awful defacing the europe-wide map with this. At a high 
level of zoom, I grudgingly suppose it might be OK, but as it stands it 
looks like a fly on the map!

At the moment it looks like a fault. But if these things proliferate all 
over the Europe home page, then what a first time viewer will see is a 
map full of adverts, not a map of collaborative effort. I think this is 
a shame and devalues the project.

I understand the need for income, but I'd much rather see words down the 
side than see the map altered because it looks like that's the map's 
purpose if we do that. It gives a fundamentally different message to the 
viewer about what the map is for. London is less prominent,indeed 
obscured, by 'Homes for sale in Banstead'.

David