May 9, 2010

DoGooder Extension/Addon Aims to Raise Money for Green Initatives

The other day, I was surfing one of my favorite blogs, Downloadsquad, and came across a great article by Lee Mathews about the DoGooder extension for Chrome/Firefox. The extension replaces advertisements on websites with those of "green initiatives and movements for positive social change."

My favorite feature of the extension is that it blocks ugly, frustrating, and just plain annoying advertisements with interesting, colorful, and surprisingly informative ads. Also, I do not have to feel guilty for blocking the advertisements on the site because, as Lee Mathews explains:
Unlike extensions such as AdBlock, DoGooder doesn't actually block a publisher's original ads. Instead, it loads them and then covers them up with its own ads. That's a good thing for publishers, since it means their ad impressions won't be affected. DoGooder also maintains a whitelist of websites which have similar advertising practices, and the extension allows users to flip back to the original ads if they wish to do so.
The only thing I wish I could change with DoGooder is the added icon to the Chrome interface. I hope this will be optional in the future. For additional details about the DoGood program, check out the DoGood Headquarters website.

The DoGooder Extension is available for Chrome and Firefox. I highly recommended it!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chris,

Great article. You can actually eliminate the icon in the browser (or any plug-in icon in Chrome) by simply "dragging" the edge of the vertical bars between the icon and the URL dialogue box at the top of the browser. Dragging the bars to the right will do the trick. Cheers.

Unknown said...

Thank you for the comment! That is a good point. You do have the ability to hide the icon using the sliders as you mentioned. Despite not being able to completely disable it, this is a good workaround.

Great tip!