WordPress YouTube ad surprise

The video-player link at the bottom is an ad, not part of my article.

WordPress.com has made it very easy to post YouTube videos, a feature I’ve used a lot. (See the Video and WP Tips menu items above.)

However, I’ve just discovered that WordPress.com, is also embedding YouTube video ads in my pages. I knew that new visitors sometimes would see clearly marked text ads at the end of blog posts, but I don’t like the fact that these video ads are indistinguishable from the content of the page.

Since they are not shown to logged-in users, I never see them. But today I visited my Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) blog using an old laptop, and discovered an unrelated YouTube video at the bottom of the page — looking just like the embedded videos I sometimes use as part of blog items.

I can make all of the ads go away by paying WordPress.com an annual fee, and that’s probably what I’ll do — as soon as I balance my budget for the year. I’ve read the original terms of service for using WordPress, but only remembered a reference to “We very occassionally show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.” Unlike text ads I had seen, the video (or graphics) not only look like part of my “content,” they also slowed down the loading of pages on that old laptop.

If you know of a WordPress page or forum discussing this YouTube ad policy — Is it new? — please add a comment below.

Sometimes you can’t get the story out

I stumbled on this interview while tracking down a YouTube video to explain ocular migraines to a friend. I’m lucky — the migraines I get are the “ocular” variety, only visual-effect symptoms with some minor numbness and verbal confusion, and the episodes are brief and infrequent. I’m also not on camera at the time.

California TV reporter Serene Branson gave a great demonstration of aphasia with a migraine headache attack on camera last winter, and mentioned blurred vision as one of the precursor symptoms, along with some mental confusion.

“I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t have the words to say it,” she said. That’s it in a nutshell. Here’s another site with a discussion of Branson’s aphasia-migraine symptoms.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to see that some YouTube uses with Flash or other animation skills have tried to document their ocular migraine experiences. So far, these two are the closest I’ve seen to mine.

Unfortunately, no one has documented what these look like when you are trying to present information to a class, read a book as part of your research, grade a stack of student papers or preview a few dozen Web design pages.

I’m glad to see that a couple of these have explicit (if obvious) advice about what to do if one of these things starts while you are driving: Stop. It would be very bad if the first onset were a blindspot that hid a pedestrian crossing the street — or a Miata changing lanes at high speed on the interstate.

Ocular-only migraines don’t have the traditional horrible headache and nausea; I had full-feature “classic” migraines like that when I was in my teens and twenties, but appeared to have outgrown them throughout grad school and my first teaching job.

The painless visual version started about 7 years ago, but rarely has happened more than a few times a year, until recently. Mine sometimes are accompanied by a slight aphasia and numbness. Other websites agree with what doctors have told me — that the dynamic visual effects put the whole thing in the “migraine, don’t worry unless they get worse, longer or more frequent…” category, not something more serious like a stroke or TIA.

(Knocking on wood again.)