User First Web

Where do the phone makers get their dictionaries?

Someone recently pointed me to this funny blog post entitled “15 Unfortunately Placed Ads” (Some of the content is a bit risqué).

The humor of the ad placements alone isn’t enough to warrant a blog post. Instead what interested me was the online ads were almost certainly placed by software attempting to match keywords.

One of the example is a Folgers Coffee ad placed next to an article entitled “Coffee Might Trigger Heart Attack in Some.” Folgers likely bought ads to be placed on Yahoo’s content network whenever the word “coffee” showed up. However, they probably wouldn’t chose to place their ad next to this story if given the opportunity to chose.

This is the danger of context-based advertising. The current filters are not smart enough to know whether or not the true context of the content is conducive to the advertising.

I wonder whether sites like Facebook will encounter this problem more frequently because it is just as likely that someone is going to be ranting about coffee as they are praising it. I imagine Google and the other leading advertising engines are already experimenting with ways to determine the positive or negative nature of the content.

I think we’ll see a lot more ads with unfortunate placement before the technology progresses to the point where it can be prevented automatically.

From yesterday’s Twitter transcript:

09:43 am grigs: Really enjoyed the ALA Web Dev Survey http://tinyurl.com/yskc3h Well written report. Wish it has included billed rates. Any surveys on that?

09:46 am grigs: Twitter usage of tinyurl makes it difficult to track links. No way to set up a (blog)search for tinyurls that point to your site.

09:46 am grigs: There is a service there that tinyurl could provide.

09:55 am selenamarie: @grigs thanks for the pointer.

10:02 am grigs: @selenamarie what pointer? oh, the ALA report? can’t remember what i did moments ago.

10:15 am selenamarie: @grigs: twittermentia?

Selena went on to define Twittermentia as:

twittermentia: happens when you can only remember your most recent post to Twitter.

This is the first time I can recall a new term being defined to describe my behavior. I’m not sure if I should be happy or ashamed.

Betsy says to own it and given the fact that it probably won’t be the last time I can’t remember what I was just doing, I should probably do as she says. Thanks Selena. :-)

My friend Selena pointed out that we had both written about the Clay Shirky article that I referenced earlier this week. She was kind not to point out that she wrote about the article two weeks earlier. This is simply the latest in a series of times where Selena was ahead of me on discovering valuable things.

In college, Selena was running a Linux box, talking about open source software, and working on quality of service routing before these topics were mainstream. At the time, I didn’t understand why she was so excited about them.

When we bumped into each other a few years ago, she convinced me to give social bookmarking, tagging and similar technologies a second look. Now I can’t imagine living without my delicious bookmarks.

Essentially, Selena is one of the smartest people I know. I’ve been rediscovering trails she already had blazed for as long as I’ve known her.

Given these facts, I’ll declare a small victory that this time I was only two weeks behind her. :-)

I’ve been trying to find the RSS feeds on Facebook that TechCrunch wrote about earlier today when I was prompted by Facebook with a requirement to add a security question. Here is a screenshot of what I saw:

Who remembers the name of their first stuffed animal? The time you were born, not the year. My third grade teacher had a Japanese last name that I can’t remember how to spell. Too bad it wasn’t my fourth grade teacher who I liked much less, but whose name is simple to spell. Least favorite nickname? Uh… First kiss? Well, she was cute. I remember that much.

Maybe this is just a sign that I’m getting too old, but the only question from the list that I felt confident answering is my mother’s maiden name, and maybe I’ll give her a call just to be safe. :-)

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