On News.com's New Look: A lot of people have expressed their annoyance, but I must say, I have sympathy for anyone trying to make a business out of ad sales on the web. We've all learned to completely ignore banners, so they don't bother us -- which means, they also don't work, at least that's the common opinion. Knowing that, we must acknowledge that CNET, among others, is subsidizing our information access (At least, I assume their News.com division does not make a profit -- if they do, they soon probably won't be it they relied on banners.), and that's not going to last forever. I would like News.com to stick around and continue to be free, even be profitable, so I'm willing to put up with a little more annoyance (though, I don't believe that's the only option -- I think some sort of win-win is possible -- um, don't ask me how). So, despite the fact that their claim that the pages don't load any more slowly isn't true if you don't already have the Flash player in memory -- otherwise, it seems to take at least an extra 10 seconds -- I don't feel able to complain too much. What I do believe they have overlooked, however, is the extreme degradation in user experience that is caused by the choppy scrolling that is a result of the Flash inline with the text. This may not be true on all platforms/browsers/machines, but for me, when I'm reading a News.com story now, and am scrolling to read more text, I get this herky-jerky sort of scrolling that makes it harder to read smoothly and is just unpleasant. I could see how it could be considered not a huge deal, but I'm sure it will, over time, lower my opinion of CNET/News.com as a brand and reduce my likelihood of reading or linking to their stories.