Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Stop that! / Industry acting, somewhat, to address annoying pop-up ads on Web sites

A Pittsburgh paper produced the best-yet summary of issues facing pop-up advertising, bringing up the fact that the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is in the midst of its comment period for voluntary guidelines on pop-ups. The IAB let loose its own version of the guidelines early on to suffice as a starting point, one that critics said would do very little. (A Jupiter analyst said they were lame enough that "no Web site will fail to meet" them.) The review gets interesting commentary from actual agencies and other practitioners as to why they use pop-ups, where they are effective, and what sort of policies might make the brunt of users and advertisers happier, if not happy.