a gift, from 2009 to you

So David Pogue is a technology writer guy that I like, and he does these Pogie Awards for the best tech ideas each year.

While perusing his choices for 2009, one struck my fancy, it's this Readability thing, and it is AWESOME!

Basically it's a button you can put up in your favorites or bookmark toolbar thing, and when you click it, it takes away every ad on the website you're viewing and just shows you the main text plus images.

You get to choose from different "looks", like magazine, novel, etc. It doesn't work for every website, but when it does I think it's awesome. I absolutely hate those teeth whitening ads, I know you know the ones.

So for example, a site looks like this...



.. with several page elements we could do without. (Ahem, exhibits 1, 2 and 3)



... and after you click the Readability button, it changes to look like...


THIS!


Let me give you a closer look-





I guess it kind of takes away from the "website" look, so if that's a minus for you, then don't use it, but I like it on recipe sites where you're reading along and all of a sudden there's a more indented paragraph telling you how a woman in your city makes $6,000 a month and they can tell you how... I like it!

(pictures are screenshots from my computer. If you look very closely, you can see that I'm reading the blog Darling Dexter in another tab...)