Are you as sick as I am of distracting, noisy, movement-filled websites and online ads? You’ve seen the ones I’m talking about:

The video ad that plays automatically when you visit a site. The tacky ad with the belly fat jiggling next to stories about tragedy in Haiti. Ads that suddenly expand, taking up half your screen until they finish and return to their original tiny size.

Those ads do little more than guarantee I’ll never purchase the product or service advertised in such an intrusive, annoying way. Apparently the authors of the Readability bookmarklet, Arc90, share my sentiments. If you do, too, you’re going to like this simple little tech tool.

Readability strips away all the clutter on a page and leaves only the main article you want to read, formatted according to a few preferences you set beforehand (font size and style, for instance). It lives in your browser’s toolbar and when you want to use it, you just click it and voila – jiggling belly fat and dancing mortgagees are gone!

Here’s a very short video that shows Readability in action:

[Can't see the embedded video? Click here to view it on the web.]

Get your own free copy of Readability here.