Advertisers don’t seem to have any boundaries when it comes to getting their “message” out there.

Backers of a new model hope to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet—the text of articles and message boards—in what they bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play.

But the IntelliTXT system, which rolls out today, is drawing the ire of journalists and others who say it not only blurs the line between advertising and editorial, it erases it.

Vibrant Media is betting Web surfers will get accustomed to seeing green, double-underlined words sprinkled throughout articles and message board posts. Scroll over one of the green IntelliTXT links on a 17-inch monitor and up pops a green-tinted 2-by-4-inch ad that looks like one of the ads in the right-hand column of a Google results page. Clicking on the link takes surfers to the advertiser’s splash page. IntelliTXT tested since last year in about 100 online publications, including Hearst’s Popular Mechanics and several technology, gaming and automotive sites.

I did some looking around and found an example of what one of these ads looks like:

I did a little analysis of the page and there are very few changes to the actual body of the HTML.  The only thing I could find in the source was that the body was contained in a <div id=“intelliTxt”> tag and a single <script> entity was added, which loaded dynamically generated JavaScript from an ASP script on ‘itxt.vibrantmedia.com’.  The JavaScript code is somewhat obfuscated, but from what I can see it scans the text of the ‘intelliTxt’ division and adds the pop-up text based on a list of keywords that it knows about.

Since this scheme relies on getting the JavaScript code from a server, the simple solution to removing it is to make the server inaccessible from the client.  If the JavaScript code isn’t downloaded you’ll end up with the original content sans the keyword popups.  An old trick a lot of people have been using is to add the offending server to their local ‘hosts’ file with an IP address of 127.0.0.1, which is the loopback address (i.e. any traffic to 127.0.0.1 doesn’t go anywhere outside of the local machine).  People usually put doubleclick.com and some other obnoxious ad servers in there.  I have verified that this trick works with IntelliTXT as well.

If you’re a Windows user (NT, 2000, or XP), add the following line to the file windowssystem32driversetchosts (95/98/ME users have a hosts file, but I don’t remember if it’s in the same location):

127.0.0.1    itxt.vibrantmedia.com

I should note that I’m not opposed to advertising in general.  It costs money to run a website.  Further, the technology itself isn’t necessarily bad.  Some sites use similar technology to show definitions for certain keywords, which is useful.  However, there’s something that just feels slimy about hooking advertising to the basic text of an article.  Or in the case of Off-Road.com, the advertisting is added to the message boards, which means that text entered by users conversing with one another is subject to these ads.  It’s kind of like having someone else pervert your words to use in their marketing efforts.