staringispolite

Apologies for the overload, all. Currently resizing the server, should be better shortly

In my experience, hyperbole serves me well in my goals. "Produce more than you consume" is more defendable in terms of online critique, and you ARE right. But I have enough forces bombarding me with reminders to consume (advertising, internet, TV, procrastination...) In this tug-of-war, these rules are the only thing pulling in the opposite direction. I want my rules to be strongly worded enough to pull me back to the right mindset/goal.

I'm no expert, but two things come to mind:

1a) That is sub-optimal for ad publishers. I think in building such a system you have to assume they want to make the most money. And while ANY ad may not make much money, it's certainly not capped at the $0 they can expect from NO ad.

1b) Also: imagine if you implement AdCompanyX's html, and you see nothing. Is it broken? Out of ad inventory? Not yet parsed your page? It's not an impossible problem, but it adds UX complexity.

2) As I said in the original post, It's possible it's actually too far of a leap to go from dinosaurs (to kids?) to games. If this is the case, imagine some sort of fitness function scoring how close the best inventory match is to the content of the page. There's a cutoff under which you show no ad. Dinosaur could likely still be close enough to pass this test. Especially given the relatively little text in this example.

I think it's a good thing in that it's led to the most commercially successful search and ads company in history (which - in large part - does deliver very relevant content, and relatively lower sadness than many competitors). But it's clear there is much room to improve.

That point you're addressing was meant to illustrate one way in which it is difficult to find an ad match that doesn't induce sadness. (As opposed to defend the current approach as the "end-state")

I applaud this fantastically succinct point: "Some foods taste good but kill you. Some drugs make you feel good but rot your brain. And some ads lead the curious away from knowledge."

I do think, however, that it's incredibly difficult to construct an entirely machine-learning- and auction-based ad network without these sorts of problems popping up. Especially with presumably low dinosaur-related ad inventory to choose from. (Perhaps dinosaurs -> kids -> games isn't a far leap in terms of correlation?)

Based on physorg's deceptive ad placement, text styling, and terrible anti-aging ad selection for the bottom, I would argue that our collective sadness is better directed at them than at Google.

I see your point, but you ignored the next few words of my comment: "Based on the merits of the individual comment, sure."

"Humor for humor's sake" is not what I, nor that TEDx talk, was referring to.

I think Google is usually pretty forward about their privacy policies and letting you customize what data they store. (See those recent "this stuff is important" popups on virtually every Google property)

Here's hoping they thought of issues like: Guy wears his new "Google Goggles" to a racy late-night sales meeting, and Gmail serves how wife ads for divorce papers.

Is sarcasm always unwanted here? I actually chuckled at the beginning until it turned too serious toward the end.

There was a great TEDx talk on the (well-executed) use of humor, and satire in particular, to get points across when they would otherwise be disregarded, or to make bland points more viral: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bliss_comedy_is_translation.h...

I don't see a reason to discourage sarcasm out-of-hand, or any other form of humor. Based on the merits of the individual comment, sure.

And Google Goggles is already taken. WHY?!

Heh, it may be that I'm running on little sleep, but I initially read the headline literally, and got excited about a sweet publicity stunt :)

Looks to me, pipio is a replacement to almost every social site out there (facebook, friendfeed, twitter mashups, likaholix, etc...) and thus is "boiling an ocean" in terms of startup goals.

Man I do wish they'd do that publicity stunt tho and _actually_ try to boil an ocean :) Maybe one day.