Cox Crow

Well, Duh!

Now if we could only go back to the good, old days, when the only sites with pop-ups were pr0n sites:

MSNBC: ‘Pop-up' relief for AOL members? Reducing the number of pop-up ads is a part of the online service company's grand scheme to get back on the growth track... [Tomalak's Realm]

Pop-ups, pop-unders, and pop-offs are annoying as all get out, and drive customers away, or attract inadvertent traffic through deceptive practices. These things do not result in sales for the advertiser. The problem is that advertising is billed for by impressions. It is to the benefit of the medium, the seller of space, to generate as many impressions as possible — thus overloading the space.

Changing the billing to a per click rate would reduce, somewhat, the incentive to overload the space, but wouldn't improve the effectiveness of the advertising. That requires a good hook, and appropriateness to the audience.

5:08:28 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media

Would legal requirements to install filtering software on computers apply to networks? That is, if a network is available, but no computers on the network are made available to the regulated population, would a filter be required?

The network is not "provided." It merely exists.

3:16:32 PM #
categories: Law, Note to Self

Dittohead

I've added the link element to this site for RSS autodiscovery. Sometimes I'm a bit slow on the uptake. This time it's because I was thinking along a adjacent path: that the RSS feed itself should update the subscription URL.

This whole shebang reminds me of the work on List-Subscribe: et cetera headers (RFC 2369) for e-mail. All good listservers add these headers, but we're still missing MUAs that know how to manage mailing lists for us.

2:49:44 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Rick noticed that the truncate callback produced RSS that rendered all upgefuckt in Radio's aggregator, so I'm now producing a feed that contains full stories. And for some reason paragraph tags are disappearing.

2:22:56 PM #
categories: Writing Online

Changing the world, one suicide bomber at a time

She showed no emotion in the interview until the end, when she cried when speaking about her parents. "I don't know what I'm going to say to them. I can only ask for forgiveness," she said. [link added]

12:56:30 PM # Google It!
categories: Sadness

Trails of Pennies

The down side as some of you will be quick to point out: thanks to cut and paste capabilities, lots of people were able to read the controversial comments without visiting CableWorld.com. The up side: recognition for the magazine, publicity for the story and the chance to watch the Internet at work.
— "From Acorns to Mighty Oaks," Online Journalism Review via Kellner's Interviewer Speaks Out [ LawMeme]

While her column is a good overview of network effects on a work of journalism, Ms. Kramer doesn't understand 1) that copying is permitted in commentary, particularly criticism, regardless of how she feels about it; 2) that there is no contract, either implied or not, so her downside is not possible to prevent.

Either she doesn't know, or doesn't quite grasp, that broadcast television, and any advertising medium for that matter, is a barker, a shill, the guy on the street trying to get you to come into the store. They just toss pennies on the sidewalk, whether you pick them up or not doesn't matter. If you do, that doesn't matter either. They just happen to be strewn on the sidewalk in a trail leading into the shop.

If no one comes into the store, he's not doing too good a job of convincing people that they should buy something.

As Mulher says: "I don't owe that lady who gives me cheese samples at the grocery store an obligation to buy the whole dairy aisle."

c.f. Wealth Bondage

Jenny, our friendly neighborhood Shifted Librarian, offers Ms. Kramer two good recommendations for an appropriate response to this upswell of indignation.

12:48:00 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media, Writing Online

Trails of Breadcrumbs

Continuing this week's theme of social networks, RSS feeds, link attribution, and aggregation, Jenny picked up my note, at least one persion, Adam Wendt, picked it up from her, then Joe Jenett picked it up from him: I saw this all in my aggregator. Adam Wendt is also thinking about statistics, not unlike Paolo, Brent, Jenny and I — though I have to think about stats professionally as well.

Now, you could use this as an illustration of a meme percolating through the network, but what I think is interesting are the vectors along which the meme is transmitted, since I'm pretty sure that Jenett is subscribed to my RSS feed. This looks like a job for CAIDA, if not Google or Valdis Krebs.

Then I notice that Jenny's on the same train of thought, even if only in a title.

11:34:41 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online