this is in progress

Requirements

from here : “An add-on that’s made public on AMO should be of high quality, and give users an improved web experience. We look for the following things when deciding whether an add-on is appropriate for the public side of AMO:”

• Are you responsive?
• Is the add-on clearly and accurately described?
• Are all privacy and security concerns clearly spelled out?
• Has the add-on been well-tested, and is it free of obvious or serious defects?
• Do the add-on and add-on author both treat the user respectfully?
• Is the add-on useful to an appropriately wide portion of Firefox’s users?
• Is the add-on free of unlicensed trademarks or copyrights?

Our Text

Add-Art is a Firefox extension that replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database.

Of the hundreds of add-ons available for Firefox, “adblockers” are the most popular. The most current, Adblock Plus, has over 18 million downloads since Jan 2006 (currently over 300,000/week).

For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. Add-Art attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads – it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you view a newspaper’s website or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by contemporary artists.

Our project is supplemented by an small website (http://add-art.org) providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming Add-Art shows. Every 2 weeks a new show will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators (already booked are curators from the Brooklyn Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Franisco for example). Existing images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. One artist is shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the Add-Art site.

Add-Art has been developed in the Eyebeam OpenLab and tested among a community of developers and friends since January 2008. We have a development site with a wiki, ticket system and public source repository.

The plugin has already been featured in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and CBC Radio, among others. It has won a commission from Rhizome/The New Museum and will be featured in the book, The Signs of the Time Top 100 Coolest Worldwide by Dr. Carl C. Rohde.

With the overwhelming popularity of adblockers, if Add-Art were to attract 5% of existing users, the numbers would be in the hundreds of thousands. Add-Art can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace – all over the world.

Sample Press Clippings: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/technology/14adblock.html?ex=1336795200&en=9e16b9a89df24f0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss 55