I’ve expressed my displeasure before with the hideous ads from Vibrant Media. These are the hyperlinks that appear within stories where certain keywords appear; the links are usually indicated by a double underline or an underline of a different color.
My objection is that these links are usually completely inappropriate; some advertiser “bought” a keyword and the ads pollute a medium where hyperlinks have a traditional meaning.
Today I saw the ultimate example of how bad these ads can get. In a story about the horrible floods in Mississippi and Louisiana (no, I refuse to link to the site where the story originally appeared – I just stumbled across it through Google News), I read these two paragraphs:
Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said a levee holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain breached, forcing the air evacuation of 90 patients from a hospital.
“The city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation,” Nagin told WWL-TV. “We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater. With some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet.”
It’s a horrible human tragedy. But thanks to Vibrant Media, I was able to mouse over the word devastation and see this pop-up ad:
That’s disgraceful.
Ed Bott 
I hate these too. You can block them using the hosts file in Windows.
On most of these websites, you can view the source of the page and scroll all the way to the end. There will be located the html code containing the url of the text ads server. Just copy that into your hosts files and point it to nothing. Problem fixed.
The only downside is the url is specific to websites sometimes, so you might need to add multiple entries to your hosts.
I dunno, have a look at some of the ads on the left.
Keywords eh? Who’d have them.
Bill, I can see some ads for local services in New Orleans, but nothing objectionable. When I do see ads that are objectionable (or when a visitor points it out to me), I get rid of those ads. But please note the difference between Google ads and the Vibreant Media crap: Google Ads are in a clearly labeled spot, separate from the content, and they don’t pretend to be hyperlinks.