Category: Internet
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The problem with contextual advertising
Contextual advertising is great. It makes sense that if I am viewing a web page about cars it’s fairly likely I would be interested in advertisements for cars. Sometimes the algorithm gets it wrong, though. Or if not wrong at least a bit inappropriate.
Today the Guardian ran an article about Steve Jobs’s unprecedented letter about his health; he has been suffering from a “hormone imbalance” that has caused him to lose weight over the last year. The Guardian run AdSense at the bottom of their articles and what ads did Google select?
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A new blog
I’ve decided to start another blog. It’s called f1buzz.net and it’s about Formula One. Clearly I have too much time on my hands.
I’ve started it because I’ve been looking for a good F1 blog to fill the long cold void between seasons and haven’t been that impressed with what I’ve found. The teams have their own sites as does the Formula One Administration and there are quite a few “news” sites like ITV and the BBC but there aren’t that many other good blogs around, at least not in comparison to the number of tech blogs. Probably the best is F1 Fanatic.
I’m not an expert on F1 but I hope I can contribute something vaguely interesting at the same time as learning more about the sport myself and that this post will motivate me to keep at it.
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Seeqpod
Seeqpod is cool.
Basically, it’s a music search engine and flash-based player. Apparently they don’t believe there are any copyright issues as they don’t host the tracks themselves but just link to them.
It works really well.
For example, I really like the music on this cool Sprint ad, so I loaded up seeqpod and did a search for “architecture in helsinki”. Sure enough, this was one of the ninety-four results that came back:
They even have links to the video (which is very cool.)
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An open ad network
There is an interesting article on Read/WriteWeb by Sean Ammirati called Google’s Potential Vulnerability – An Open Ad Network. In it, Sean suggets that, despite Google’s huge revenues, they could be vulnerable to the fact that 37% of that revenue comes from ads delivered on sites they don’t control.
While they do have contracts with some of the larger online properties that leverage their ad network, even in that case those networks could switch when the contract comes up for renewal.
Google seems invincible at the moment and Yahoo and Microsoft aren’t making much progress competing against them head-on. But the way to compete against a monopoly is to change the rules of the game. This is what MySQL did with databases and it is what Openads is going to do with the online advertising industry.
Google is still a disruptive force in many areas but it needs to be careful that it’s own disruptive business models are not distrupted by some startup…
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Google Maps
I love Google Maps. So many clever people keep coming up with cool ideas for the API. This one shows what will be under water when sea levels rise. Looks like we’ll be ok at 7m but Kathryn’s office will have to move…
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Google Video
Where would we be without Google video? We’d certainly have fewer farting pig, awsome pen tricks and cool fighter plane videos to waste our time.
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Old fashioned websites
Remember ten years ago the web used to be riddled with sites like this?
Good to see there are still crappy home made web sites out there with lots of nasty tiled backgrounds and flashing animations.
