My favorite day of the week Friday has fast become the epicenter of activity around our office. As I write this I have little more than 30 minutes before our weekly live (2 hours) radio show, have had an in person appointment that went over their scheduled time and I’m just now starting to peer at my daily reading. Oh, and my planned Hmmcast for 420 today needs to be scrapped because what I shot video of has an NDA covering it. And I don’t have any video replacement recorded yet. Doh!

Maybe I’ll have to take a vacation day for the Hmmcast today. If you don’t see one published at 420, then that’s what I decided to do.

Haven’t done any Hmm quickies for awhile, but might have to make an exception later today. Putting this one in the productivity category because, well, it’s sort of anti-productivity.

The devil in the 300×250?
In the meantime, one of the things we’re batting around on today’s show is the omnipresent 300×250 ad. I received an email from a Google Adsense rep about adding a 300×250 ad here somewhere. I looked at the current design and don’t really see a good way to do it and have passed on the prospect for the time being, but we just started running one at our group VTOReality.com blog. We’re wrestling through where to put the beast — or if we even want to continue to use it at all over there. Very experimental at the present.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the 300×250 ad size but the Google rep explained this was their “most popular” format and one that allows videos and other creative ads. There are some design changes I’d like to see here at Hmm someday and maybe in certain cases the 300×250 could/would be used, but I like a clean reading experience and those 300×250 ads seem kind of obnoxious to me as a reader. For example, the Hmmcast should be more video-like. I’ve noticed many video bloggers only have one video per page which is something I’m interested in exploring.

I’ll throw this out to readers: what do you think of the 300×250 ads? Do they bother you? Do you use ad blockers already or read primarily through the RSS reader (and thus don’t care)?

Back to the mines. If my canary dies, somebody send help.

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