installing and using foof

First check your FireFox add-ons to see if you have Adblock Plus (or any other ad blocker) installed. If so, go to the tools/add-ons menu and uninstall Adblock Plus (foof includes much of the Adblock Plus functionality).

If you are installing foof from this site:

To install foof while viewing this page using FireFox browser:

• Click on the DOWNLOAD foof graphic
• Install the foof add-on
• The install dialog will begin (if you have installed foof previously, you may need to use the toolbar menu instead to do configuration. Sometimes the configuration dialogue does not appear when you restart FireFox).
• Select the types of content you wish to see - see Content Selection. for the details on the content selection dialogue.
• You are ready to browse - see the FAQ for hints on how to use foof

How to use foof

Once foof is installed and configured, foof is invoked whenever you browse a Web page.

When the foof content is displayed on a Web page, you can click on any of the content types shown in the impression's header (see above figure) and see other types of content related to the page you are viewing.

You can also use the arrows to page through additional content of the type displayed.

How foof works

To provide the content that is used to replace up to two ads per page (the rest are eliminated), foof acquires articles and videos from hundreds of high quality News, Blog, and YouTube feeds hourly and places this information in the foof semantic indexing system.

Additionally, foof has indexed the Wikipedia.

To allow an additional degree of personalization, foof also provides you the option of accessing photos in Flickr accounts. These are not contextually matched, but are randomly selected for viewing.

To use foof, you first install foof as above. The Firefox installation process occurs and foof is installed. Firefox must be restarted to complete the installation.
Once FireFox has restarted, the foof configuration dialogue launches. You now have three choices:

1. To eliminate all ads and have foof choose the content types that are semantically matched against the Web pages being browsed (foof enables News, top 100 Blog posts, Wikipedia articles, and YouTube videos, by default).
2. To eliminate all ads and have you choose the content types to be matched against the Web pages being browsed. If you select this option, you have the possibility of using photos that you stored on Flickr.
3. To simply block all ads – in which case foof blocks all possible ads using the Adblock Plus algorithms and does no content replacement.

If you choose to select the type of content, another dialogue box appears, enabling the choice of what content foof will use (News, top 100 Blog posts, Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, or your Flickr photo account).

If you select photos, as a content choice, you will get the top Flickr photos of the day unless you include your Flickr Screen Name and/or Flickr tags – which will cause foof to deliver personalized photos. See Content Selection for more details on the content selection dialogue.

The actual content delivered as replacements for ads depends upon:

1. Your content type selections (which types of content are enabled)
2. The size and geometry of the ad that is being replaced (e.g. videos don’t fit everywhere)
3. The relevance of the content found in foof’s indexes to the Web page
4. The built in foof display rules:
1. No more than two ads replaced by content per page (the rest are eliminated)
2. No more than one ad replaced by the same content type
5. The ability of foof to determine the size of the ad being replaced. This is not always easy in the Web 2.0 world. If foof can’t determine the size, the ad is just eliminated.

For the advanced user, there is additional control of the foof content placement available by clicking on the advanced button on the Content Selection dialogue box. This control allows you to force the order in which foof searches for content to replace ads.