- drop-down select for communities
- drop-down select for other publications
- temperature information, with links to weather/traffic bulletins
- a search box
- three picture adverts
- five Google text ads
- a left sidenav with 50 items on it
- 11 tabs left of that (replicating some items)
- three (changing) video links, with thumbnails
- five top story links
- six blogger links
- an invitation to bookmark the page

And that’s before you get to the actual article, where an attention-grabbing box-out disrupts your reading as soon as you get to the end of the second paragraph.

I find that a big problem with reading online is the constant temptation of ‘instant information gratification’ — it used to be that if I found myself thinking “What does that mean?” or “How does this new idea relate to that half-remembered idea?” while reading, I’d make a note and go and look it up later. Now Google-happy fingers are on the case before I’ve had time to think, so I get to the word “multitasking” and wonder how good the analogy really is with the way computers multitask, which leads me into a Wikipedia article, and then on coming back to the article the ’survival tips’ remind me that I saw something very similar on 43 folders a couple of months ago, but I can’t find it on their site, so I try googling for various remembered keywords, and halfway through something else distracts me… but that’s okay, the article is still open in a browser tab, so I’ll come back to it later. (By the end of a day I usually have about 50 tabs open.)

I’ll be interested to read more about research in this area, though… on paper, in a quiet room with no internet connection.