Category: Internet

The death of advertising?

New York Times: Ziff Davis is said to plan a bankruptcy. The once powerful media giant, whose magazines I (and every other computer user my age) once avidly, avariciously consumed, is about ready to pull a Worldcom.

It’s been a tough year in the ad business. A lot of corporations, spanked by the downturn or their own problems, just don’t have the money to spend on advertising. As a result, a lot of businesses that depend on it get wobbly. Some go under. It’s happened to quite a few places on the Web–places that decided that they would give away products or content and “monetize eyeballs.”

Yeah, we all laughed when people said this back in the .com era. But what about players like Ziff Davis? Hey, monetizing eyeballs was all they ever did. Computer magazines–just a convenient, foldable billboard for advertisers.

There’s something particularly ironic about the Ziff Davis case. As Ziff Davis was busy puffing new hardware and software offerings, and writing little lightweight pieces about web sites that contained free software you could download for your new hardware, something much more powerful was coming from that web. Companies were figuring out how to expose their content to users more directly than through ads.

And the users? They were figuring out that a lot of this new stuff was being made up on the fly. Some of them got savvy enough to help make it up themselves.

In other words, Ziff Davis got disintermediated. By the Internet.

That’s a hell of a thing. The very thing that all the .coms claimed to be doing has started to happen–after they all crashed.

And it’s not just publishing. Look at the assholery being spouted by Jamie Kellner of TNN. Would he say that if TV commercials weren’t being choked into irrelevance? If TV ads served any useful purpose to TV watchers, there would be no need for him to proclaim any “contract” that TV watchers were “violating” by skipping commercials. No, the TV audience, known more familiarly as you and me, are also Internet users. And they’ve shown all the guys dreaming up “synergy” business plans between the Internet and TV where the real synergies are. It’s in the minds of the users.

See, the TV audience, who are also Internet users, have learned things from the Internet. They’ve always known TV commercials are, in the parlance of the Net, damage. Now they’ve learned from the Internet how to route around that damage.

Who mourns for advertising?

Update: Doc kindly pointed back to this article.
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30 Days Wrap-Up

Mark Pilgrim wraps up “30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog,” the longest running and most useful targeted discussion of why standards for accessibility matter and how to implement them that’s ever written. I’m glad he’s through, because I’m about 20 days behind in implementing his recommendations and the backlog was growing. Still, we owe him a big big big round of thanks. Someone give that man a lot of money.

On a related note, I’ve forgiven Mark for winning our category in the 2001 Scripting News Awards. In the last month he’s done more service for the weblogging community than I will in a long time.

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MusicMoz–calling all music geeks

Some of you may be familiar with DMOZ, the open directory project that replaced Netscape’s old directory and attempts to be the open community-maintained alternative to the increasingly creaky Yahoo! directory. I just stumbled across MusicMoz, which attempts to be a definitive directory for music.

Why is this cool? Well, think how important IMDB is—it’s pretty much the de facto authoritative source for information about movies and TV shows on the Internet. If you want the equivalent for music, where do you go? What site can allow you to trace a musician’s progress from band to band, combine a directory with a discography and have a clean and searchable interface?

Well, nowhere, really. In my iTunes scripts, I link to Google instead. But MusicMoz might be a cool alternative. And they’re looking for category editors…
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Amazon follows Google, becomes a dev platform

Now this is cool: Amazon rolls out a free web services suite for developers. Browsing the documentation indicates that they provide a SOAP interface and an “XML over HTTP” interface that takes a URI as the call and returns an XML doc as the response. Cool tricks: “enable your Web site visitors to add products to Amazon.com shopping carts, wedding registries and wishlists directly from your site”; XSLT transforms at Amazon, meaning Amazon will return the result of your query in the format you supply; integration with Amazon’s associates program (earn money off your webservice? a unique idea)…

This opens some interesting opportunities. If I become an Amazon associate and embed my associate ID in a tool like iTunes2Manila, is it ethical for me to keep associate revenue that is generated by people who use my script on their website? Probably not, but it’s a fun thought… 🙂
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Hey, let’s all violate the DMCA!

24-Hour Drive-Thru: Elcomsoft Vs. Adobe, The Sequel. I think this is one of those occasions where a good loud outcry about the inadequacies of Adobe’s DRM technology may yet prompt them to come up with a better product, enabling librarians like Jenny and consumers like us to be able to check out eBooks through our libraries.

And yet, of course, discussing the problem is potentially a DMCA violation, because we’re discussing how to circumvent encryption technology. Never mind our intent: to help consumers. From 24-Hour Drive-Thru’s article:

When consumer publications like Consumer Reports test locks, the most important thing they do is try to break in. They send locksmiths to go to work on the locks, they get out the boltcutters on padlocks, and report which ones are broken into most easily and which ones do the best to stand up under attack. Nobody thinks there’s anything sinister about that—everybody can see the practical value. And yet when you try to do the same thing for computer technology, you’re a criminal.

Indeed, this very Weblog entry may well be a felony under the DMCA. I’ll let you know what day to watch out for me on “Cops.”

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Accessibility: relative font sizes

Mark Pilgrim: Using relative font sizes. I should be pointing to one of Mark’s articles every day. This is just one of the thoughtful, well written articles on the state of designing web sites for accessibility in 2002. It offers a good mix of audience justification for taking the trouble to make your pages resizable (“if people can’t read your words, what’s the point?”) and technical details, including stylesheet tricks that prevent Netscape 4 and Mac Opera 5 from choking on CSS syntax they don’t understand.

Of course, I haven’t had time to implement his suggestions yet. Next on my list…

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Finally, IE compatibility for this blog

After much head scratching, I finally figured out why this site never displayed correctly in IE for Windows. I had some tags nested in the following order in my template:

<div class="grabber"><h3>Heading</h3></div>

After this line, text in the following part of the page drifted just slightly to the left, eventually getting cut off by the bounding box of the parent div so that it became unreadable. By reversing the order of the <div> and <h3> tags, so:

<h3><div class="grabber">Heading</div></h3>

it works on IE for Windows.

I should amend my first sentence. While I’ve figured out how to fix the problem, I’m still not sure why the order of the tags should matter—and why IE/Windows cares when other browsers (including IE/Mac) doesn’t. But the important thing is the problem is fixed.

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The CIO of Utah gets it

Surprisingly cool find: the weblog of the CIO of Utah, Phil Windley. Seems sharp and generally clueful, as evidenced by Blogs for System Status Communications:

My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations. One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties. Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems. For the low price of $40/year we could have:

  • One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
  • A web-based record of status.
  • Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
  • Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet; RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
  • The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs.

How could you not like that?

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Killer skyscraper database

I love the World’s Tallest Buildings Diagram, though it is inaccurately named. It is in fact an interactive database that allows you to specify which skyscrapers you want to see—by name, city, architect, year, etc.—and produce a chart sorted by year, height, You can generate the Boston skyline with just a click. Even the default search—the world’s tallest buildings in height order—is dizzyingly cool, a quick whip through the architectural fancies of a dozen different countries.

Accustomed to featureless buildings like the Aon Center in Chicago, the Sears Tower, or the late lamented World Trade Center towers, it’s fascinating to see towers like the Taipei Financial Center, Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the T&C Tower in Taiwan, or even the Empire State Building as evidence that tall buildings need not be monoliths out of Kubrick’s 2001. [Hat tip to Cory and Dave for the link.]
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Happy days…

…are here again. Why, you ask? Did I get the homeowners insurance situation straightened out? Did the magical move fairy come along and make all of our stuff spontaneously appear at our new house? Did the mortgage broker throw up her hands and say, “What the heck, no closing costs! I was just kidding”?

Alas, no. But John Allison’s Scary Go Round is, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of these post dot-com times, available for free! Go look.
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