Dickover: a name for annoying website call-to-action popups

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball: You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency. I’ve written before about my frustration with these popup box thingies, that present on the screen, before you even know what website you’re on. But dickovers — is there a way we can ratify this as the official name for them? — have been around for a long time, decades by now. But it makes me wonder: is the blogosphere to blame for their prevalence today? Popup boxes, in the form of a separate browser window, that usually carried advertising of some sort, were a scourge of the early web. Eventually, browsers allowed users to block them. But the call-to-action popups that followed, are something else. Not so easy to block out. They began appearing on some of the blogs I read…