The almighty untethers us (day 130)

Something unusual happened today.  I learned of a current news event from Twitter before I learned it from anywhere else.  This is in part because I haven't been scanning my usual news sources and I've been at home but it's also because so many people twittered about it, in various forms.  I eventually had to pay attention.  My feeds, they are changing.

The ReadWriteWeb blog recently posted that RSS feeds were dead.  A brave and controversial thing to write.  Turns out I wasn't the only one that thought so.  There were many many comments from people that still rely on RSS feeds.  I was glad because when I first read the post I totally felt behind the times.  "But I still love my RSS feeds!", I wimpered.  It felt a little bit like coming back from sixth great summer break and finding out that my favourite game was now uncool.  The memo hadn't reached me in time for me to avoid making a fool of myself.   Thankfully RSS feeds are not dead and RWW had to capitulate.

The news that had people all atwitter is almost as exciting as my feeds changing - Google has announced the latest Android phone and it's not tied to a carrier.  It's the last part that's amazing.  That's right, you buy the phone and you can use it on any network!!!  This should not be such a gift because it should have been the norm all along, but there it is - a gift from mother Google.  I have no idea if any of this will be valid in Canada but it's only a matter of time.   This means that my previous rant may be moot in a year or two when carriers will be forced to compete for my phone's attention.  Take that Bell/Telus/Rogers.

A song for this post.

Look at me (day 21)

Advertising is annoying.  Advertising is changing.  Will it still be annoying?  I remember when I first browsed on Mosaic in 1994.  It was quiet.  Academics were the only ones there.   It was made for us, by us.  It was good.  Then slowly buying and selling became the thing you did on the internet.   Then the individual home page, then social networking.  Now companies not only have web sites they have their tentacles in all areas of our travel on the web.   You do a search, an ad pops up.  You read an email, an ad pops up.   I am a potential buyer, practically everywhere.   I tell myself that I can ignore the ads and I think I do.  But I wonder how much actually sticks anyway.  Once in a while I can't help but glance and get curious.  On Firefox, I use Add-Art which replaces the image ads with art images.   When I first installed it, I would forget that the ads were being replaced and I would get really annoyed at the image that didn't fit.  What is that, what is that, what is that, what is that???? Then I'd clue in.  Oh it's art.  I'm not supposed to figure out if I need it or not.   Phew.

So here we are with a loose model of "free only because your gaze is valuable".   Yes my gaze is valuable to you.  But it's also valuable to me.  Where it lands affects me.  So discernment should be possible in the face of such a wide variation in quality.  The one saving grace to google ads is that they are pretty much all the same format so easy to ignore.  There's no flashing or dancing bears or shoot the monkey.  Other sites are not so kind.  Discernment becomes really difficult when the guy doing push-ups is constantly begging you to help him so you can win a prize.  I stopped watching TV because it started to feel like a mind control device.  I can't say the web is at that point but I am looking to my smart phone more and more.    Eventually advertising will follow me there too.  It hasn't yet....much.  But it's coming.  I only hope that it's less annoying, more entertaining, more optional.  What if it was an opt-in program?  If you say you will put up with ten ads a week, you get two dollars off your data plan.   Deal or no deal.   Of course that probably couldn't work because there are so many publishers and most of the time we'd prefer to surf anonymously however elusive that might be.   Unless the model was such that all ads used the same mechanism to pop ads on your phone and some could be allowed through depending on the deal that you signed with the telco.   A kind of ad firewall.  The thing I like about the opt-in model is that there would be some incentive to make the ads somewhat entertaining to get a following.  The question of how mobility might affect the sound/look/feel of advertising is for another day.

A song for this post.