Author: Jason Grigsby

Dangers of Context-based Advertising

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.

links for 2007-10-29

I miss Kathy Sierra

There is huge hole in the Internet that Kathy Sierra filled. This morning, I looked again for some signs of what Kathy is doing now, but her site is still dormant.

We’ve lost such a eloquent voice for building businesses and products that people are passionate about. It’s been months now, and I don’t see anyone being able to fill the void.

I miss Kathy Sierra and still hold out hope that one day she will return to blogging.

links for 2007-10-23

Twitter Updates and Facebook Status

Twitter’s Facebook application has recently been updated to allow you to change your status whenever you post to Twitter. This sounds like a good idea in practice, but in reality, it turns out to be simply redundant.

Status updates is one of the few Facebook items that are available via RSS. Now that Twitter updates change the Facebook status, most of the RSS that Facebook provides is now full of updates that I’ve already read in Twitter.

The only updates I can get out of Facebook’s walled garden is something that both started outside of the garden and something that I’ve already read. It’s easy to see why everyone thinks Facebook is so useful. </sarcasm> :-)

links for 2007-10-21

Relative URLs for HTTP and HTTPs

Ajaxian pointed to a post by Ned Batchelder on relative urls. I almost didn’t click through to the post because I didn’t think there was anything new to learn about URL syntax. Boy was I wrong.

Have you ever seen a url that looks like this?

  • <img src=’//fast.cdn.net/pix/smiley.jpg’ />

We’ve also created links that started from the first slash and dropped the domain, but I’ve never seen links that dropped the http or the https from the link. Ned explains the benefits of this technique thusly:

Here, we’ve left off the protocol scheme, but included a host name. In this case, the protocol scheme from the displayed page will be used, but against the host in the URL. The relative URL system is still in play here: omitted portions of the URL at the beginning are taken from the base page, and the relative URL takes over whereever it starts. On an HTTPS page, this will be an HTTPS request to the CDN, on an HTTP page, it will be an HTTP request.

I love it when I learn something new about a piece of technology I’ve taken for granted for years.

Is the Mobile Web Finally Set to Take Off?

Read/WriteWeb asks readers, “Is the mobile web (or, rather, using mobile devices to access the web) finally coming of age?”

In a word: Yes.

For more details, on why:

The real question is when will it take off. Are we looking at a 6 to 9 month or a 12 to 15 month horizon before the groundswell takes off.

Web Analytics guru Eric Peterson recently came to a similar conclusion about the mobile web. I think Eric nailed it when he said that the coming mobile web is probably less like a wave and more like a incoming Tsunami.