house of warwick

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: I like Russ and his comments make me think. In this case, I think he's slipped a cog. Read the excerpt, then my comments below.

Mobile Advertising

GoogleAds have made me a believer again in online advertising.

[snip]

The fact is that I first thought about mobile advertising in terms of interupting the user and taking over their display for a minute - almost like pop-ups, but actually are just interstitials that go away after a few seconds, like Salon's annoying ads. And that's just it. On a mobile phone with a shaky connection (even with the best of current networks) a small text link above or below your mobile content might actually be the best route. Simple, honest and straight forward, just like Google's text ads.

Lots to think about. I wonder if Google is thinking at all about the mobile market? They should have a Moble.com (get it?) which indexes just mobile sites (WAP and XHTML-MP) and sell mobile advertising...

[Russell Beattie Notebook]

The idea that ads would ever come up on my phone makes my skin crawl. Imagine the situation that makes the evening news. Lady getting carjacked can't make a call because her phone is being pushed ads. I realize that the situation described may be extreme, but when will we as consumers draw a line? When will someone stop and say, "Get that ad the hell out of my [insert device here]!" Why not put an LCD panel in a refrigerator, allowing the 'frig to display your family calendar most of the time, but ads for products the rest of the time. Around dinner, it starts to spew ads for steak, because the Beef Council knows your 'frig is in Amarillo and they have a bunch of extra cattle to sell.

Russell, I like the way you think, most of the time. If you have advertising revenue subsidize an essential service, then there will be a segment of the population that will trade the inconvenience ads for convenience of the product. That devalues the product and sells the ads to the lowest spending group of consumers.

Tell me why this makes sense. Where's the long term? If you say there's no long term, then why not play the market or gamble your money in Vegas?

I'm keeping my Powerbook.  I thought that a nice gentleman in California had bought it, but he didn't come up with the money.  That's good news for me--I was missing it already.  Since I already had it backed up, I decided to wipe it and start from scratch and not to install Classic.  At first, I wanted MacOS 9 dual boot capability, but I came to the (now obvious) conclusion that I don't use Classic.  My final holdout was Microsoft Office, specifically Office 98 since it runs better in Classic that Office X runs in X.

I had become used to several tweaks I had made in my install of Jaguar, specifically using Cocktail to change transparency on the dock and some unix stuff like fink and the developer tools.  I did the reintall of Jaguar last night, using the retail disks.  First thing after the reboot, it snagged the updates, so I ran through those installers.  Whew, finally done.  What was the first app I reinstalled?  NetNewsWire, of course!  Best of all, my weblog never had to suffer.