The Cornell Daily Sun has sold out and put garish Google ads on their front page:

I have nothing against Google ads and run them on my own blogs, but for the Daily Sun to (a) put them on the front page and (b) in such bad style is unnaceptable. They get 1000s of visitors a day, so they could easily afford to put ads on the archives only. If they want the ads to look natural, they should also have a white background and not be surrounded by table guides. Then they’ll interrupt the vertical-horizontal flow less. An even better solution would be to just move them to the sidebar–oh wait–they already have an ad strip there!

Also, their website doesn’t even validate. In fact, it lies about the content-type. I had to manually switch it to iso-8859-1. I guess it’s not their fault, though, since their home page contains the following:

<!————————————————————————-
* Copyright : (c) 1998-2001 -New Digital Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
* Contact : info@newdigitalgroup.com
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Remind me to email them…