Older blog entries for dmarti (starting at number 426)

Adtech stinks.

Derek Thompson: Time to Admit What We Already Knew: Online Ads Stink. "Every single major tech and business story this week was the same story: Even companies with 100 million, 700 million, and 900 million free users don't know what to do about Internet advertising."

That's a good point, and that's even before the Facebook bot frenzy. But it looks like the real problem isn't the general idea of advertising on the internet, but the rat hole that we've gotten ourselves into with increasingly precise targeting. The better that ad targeting in a medium gets, the worse the ad medium works overall. Which is why radio and print pull in an oversized share of ad budgets, and web and mobile underperform.

Mike Downey, Vice President of Mobile Solutions for OpenX, has some advice for advertisers that should look familar by now. Real-time bidding is the next mobile ad breakthrough—here’s how you can profit. The answer, of course, is to collect more data, and throw more math at the problem.

We are seeing signals from our exchange that granular geo targeting is becoming a primary driver of bidding behavior in mobile. Publishers that are able to pass a longitude and latitude are seeing more than a 50% premium on their inventory. If you listen to the free version of Pandora on your mobile device you might have noticed that Panera Bread is selling sandwiches at lunchtime. The holy grail of driving local commerce via digital media seems to be getting closer and is eminently achievable with mobile.

(Yes, another knight of adtech seeks the holy grail.)

John Battelle, in Who’s On First? (A Modest Proposal To Solve The Problem with First- and Third-Party Marketing), wants site-by site control of third-party tracking. "I think we all already wear 'electronic clothing' that follows us around, and we seem to be unaware of it. That has to change." Battelle is a board member of the IAB. Bonus link from the same source: My, How the CMO Has Changed. General Motors has a "central video wall sporting constantly updated feeds reflecting consumer sentiment about GM and its brands."

Lois Beckett on ProPublica: Dark Money Political Groups Target Voters Based on Their Internet Habits. "Even when Internet users are sophisticated enough to spot a targeted ad, as Lauren Berns did, it is almost impossible for them to find out why a certain organization is targeting them—or what data about them is being used." (Just in case you needed another scare story about filter bubbles and creepy tracking.)

Extreme privacy measures from JR Conlin: Lying to the Internet. "My fake person gets her own browser (or browser profile for those that support it) where she is logged in to sites various sites long enough for me to get what i want and then leave. i tend to use her when visiting new sites to poke at things and see if that site has earned my trust (or at least provided enough value that i feel i could use it). Most of the time, the answer is 'no'."

I don't think we should all go as far as Conlin does, but if we redesign norms, infrastructure, and client software to make tracking less accurate, we're going to see both more total spending on Internet advertising and a larger share of that flowing through to publishers.

Syndicated 2012-07-31 14:24:46 from Don Marti

Links about connected organizations, and a must-read 1989 book

Islands in the Net: might as well read it because we're already living it. Some thought-provoking articles on networked organizations and related topics.

Ruslan Meshenberg explains Open Source at Netflix. "We’ve observed that the peer pressure from “Social Coding” has driven engineers to make sure code is clean and well structured, documentation is useful and up to date. What we’ve learned is that a component may be 'Good enough for running in production, but not good enough for Github'."

Mike Hendrickson tries the new developer laptop from Dell: Dell’s Sputnik – Git what you want. "As I explored, what struck me was that, out of the box, Sputnik was not full of unnecessary bloatware apps. Some folks have said that Macs don’t come with bloatware either. To them, I’d ask: have you used Safari? To me, it is not in the same class as Firefox or Chrome—yet you have to keep it on your system or all hell breaks loose."

Sean Park on designing a loosely coupled organization: The Connected Company. "By explicitly embracing a networked rather than hierarchical structure we have built in the ability to experiment and fail while at the same time giving us many more chances to succeed."

Syndicated 2012-07-31 13:52:27 from Don Marti

Holy grail, or chalice of poison?

What is your name?

The ad tech bubble.

What is your quest?

To seek the holy grail.

What is your favorite color?

I don't know, what does our database say that your favorite color is? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Sorry, Monty Python, but it was the first thing I thought of after reading this: “Ultimately advertising should mesh with content and users’ interests. This remains the Holy Grail…” at the OpenX blog. Jonathan Miller, of News Corporation's Digital Media Group (yes, that News Corporation) reflects the conventional wisdom on online advertising really well.

"The more real-time and the more data enriched we get the better the services and the better the experience will ultimately be for the user."

Really? But what's the long-term result of throwing more math at advertising? For another perspective, see Advertising Gets Personal by Samuel Greengard in Communications of the ACM.

Critics believe the inability to control what software and tracking mechanisms are placed on a person's computer is nothing less than a violation. Many Web sites contain a half-dozen to a dozen or more tracking tools or third-party cookies. It is akin to a company installing video cameras and microphones in a home and recording everything that occurs in the household. "When people find out what is really happening, the typical response is 'Are you kidding!'" says Marcella Wilson, an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

For a long time, ad blocking was a nerdy Internet sideshow. It was easy and effective, but few users did it. I wrote an ad blocker myself, and got one other user—another Linux freak, who rewrote it.

But new attention to the tracking problem, especially the Wall Street Journal's What They Know series, might be changing that. One startup, ClarityRay, is reporting that 9.26 percent of all ad impressions on 100 popular sites are being blocked.

My best guess is that ad blocking is finally catching on for two reasons. First, personalized advertising just sets off people's intuitions about what's creepy. (We've all read the Charles Duhigg piece in the New York Times about how Target tracks who's pregnant and who's not.) Second, it goes back to the whole signaling thing,

As a reader, as soon as it looks like advertising is just for you and not a general statement, it gets less valuable. Why do we leaf through magazine ads, but discard most direct mail unopened? Targeting reduces the signal.

In the long run, the real Holy Grail for this business is software and infrastructure that does a better job on privacy. That way, nobody's creepiness buttons get pushed and ads carry a clear signal of the advertiser's intentions.

Syndicated 2012-07-30 14:18:37 from Don Marti

Third-party tracking enabled here (or not)

As I've been saying for a while, we have a problem in how we talk about third-party tracking on the web.

When you're on Site A, and the browser tells Site B about it without your knowledge, that's a bug in the browser. Unexpected behavior. Unfortunately, too often, we make Site B the subject of the sentence. "Site B is tracking users! How can we regulate sites to keep them from doing this?"

This is dangerous. If we pursue the approach of regulating all the site Bs out there, we'll end up with a situation in which sites with sufficient lobbyists and lawyers will be able to track you, and others won't. And it's the sites with the lobbyists and lawyers you're probably worried about.

The safer approach is to rethink how browsers handle third-party content. I'm running RequestPolicy, which is great, and secure, and all, but requires some work to approve third-party domains. On the first visit to a new site, I have to pick out the sneaky trackers from the harmless CDNs.

Microsoft's Tracking Protection for Internet Explorer is also promising, since it lets users share lists of sites to block and approve.

Anyway, if you see some third-party web site logos below this post, your browser has betrayed you, and it might be a good idea to file a bug or look at privacy extensions.

Syndicated 2012-07-29 14:54:32 from Don Marti

The online advertising problem: bullet points

Here's a quick outline of the online advertising problem.

• Advertising gains signaling value when it's attached to something that the user sees as difficult or expensive to produce.

• Advertising gains signaling value as its apparent cost increases.

• Advertising loses signaling value as it's attached to less valuable resources.

• Advertising loses signaling value as it becomes more targetable, since the user can't tell how much of the resource was funded by the ad impression that he or she saw.

• Advertisers tend to pay less for ad media with lower signaling value.

• Internet advertising has a problem: it's targeted increasingly finely, and is therefore less valuable to advertisers.

• Solution: Design infrastructure and applications to make tracking more difficult.

Syndicated 2012-07-26 14:38:11 from Don Marti

Link frenzy: Essays on organizations, information, and work

Stephen O'Grady on competitive advantage: Software is the New On Base Percentage

Derek Thompson: The Consumer's Revenge: Can We Beat Corporations at the Efficiency Game?

Crowdfunding FTW: Joey Hess: I work for The Internet now

John Hagel on empowered customers, the VRM movement, and Doc's new book: The Rise of Vendor Relationship Management

Paul Smalera catches up with Clayton Christensen: Paradise regained: Clayton Christensen and the path to salvation (If I had to nominate one word for the “You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” award, I'd have to pick disruptive.)

Paul Ingrassia on cars that changed the market: Car czars "The people who created them overcame formidable obstacles to put them on the road."

Doing unimportant projects, but really well: “You can’t control what you can’t measure” revisited.

Umair Haque: Declare Your Radicalness. "We may honor the radical—but we surround ourselves with the banal, trivial, humdrum, and tedious."

Robert X. Cringely gives you something to think about next time someone calls you a "resource": IT class warfare — It’s not just IBM

Gar Alperovitz on co-ops: A New Era for Worker Ownership. (Somebody needs to put together a conference panel that's half co-op people and half crowdfunding people.)

Peter Levine: Software Eats Software Development "GitHub runs one big SCM in the cloud and the management issues vanish."

Penelope Trunk: How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway. One author who can out-publicize the Publicity department.

Jonathan Kahn on making your web site look nice on phones, I mean totally transforming how you organize information: Digital-first companies thrive on mobile disruption. Everyone else struggles. "I have bad news: a fancier CMS won’t help you withstand mobile disruption."

Remind anyone of r0ml's IT deli? Fast-turnaround IT projects at DoD: Conversations Between Scientists and Sailors: UNSCRIPTED

Daniel Lemire: Why we make up jobs out of thin air. "People who complain that big governments are inefficient are missing the point: they are not meant to be financially efficient, they are meant to confer as much prestige as possible onto as many people as possible. In this way, big governments are highly efficient and so are large corporations. I predict a bright future for both of them." On a related subject, Christopher J. Coyne reviews David Keen's Useful Enemies. War Is Still a Racket.

Syndicated 2012-07-24 14:20:59 from Don Marti

Web development links

(another batch of interesting links that have piled up.)

Eric Holscher: Why Read the Docs matters. "Having a shared platform for all documentation allows for innovation at the platform level, allowing work to be done once and benefit everyone. Having run the site for over a year now, I think there is a third thing that we should be striving for. That is to make the quality of documentation better."

Dan Newcome: The future of Web development isn’t MVC, it’s MVM. Model-View-Mapper, that is.

Jon Mitchell: 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown. "It's amazingly useful just as a writing language. Even if you don't have to convert to HTML at all, it's still an appealing way to format plain text without having to deal with Microsoft Word or another goofy rich-text editor."

Mozilla is already home to some of the best web documentation. New initiative: Introducing “Mozilla Webmaker:” helping the world make the web Introducing Thimble: webmaking made easy Mark Surman has details: Making tools for webmakers.

Reinout van Rees takes good notes on a talk by Christophe Pettus: PostgreSQL when it is not your job. "It actually is pretty hard to seriously misconfigure postgres," but here are the key items to get right.

Everett Zufelt explains the fundamentals of Accessibility for Web developers.

Aaron Swartz: New: The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software. Develop as a twelve-factor application, among other things.

Deployment advice: Prefer data migrations to initial data. And don't make a SnowflakeServer. Rainforest Blog explains hosting on AWS: A rough guide to keeping your website up through catastrophic events (aka. hosting in a single zone)

Slick-looking new project at Adobe: Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web

Ellen Bauer, for Smashing Magazine: Create A Responsive, Mobile-First WordPress Theme. "While working on your concept sketches, also think about which layout options to offer in the theme (such as header and sidebar options or multiple widget areas) and how they will adapt to different screen sizes as well."

Hector Garcia describes a skeleton setup for new Django projects: django-nbskel

Luke Plant: PHP, Python and Persuasion

Stephen Hay writes about "cold reading" a mobile user's intent. Great Works of Fiction Presents: The Mobile Context. "I bet the desktop site would be better if they just chucked it and used the “mobile” site for everything. Is the mobile view better because it’s better? Or is it simply better in contrast to a sucky desktop view with irrelevant content?"

Drupal works toward in-place editing. Spark update: WYSIWYG choice

Good series on cleaning up an existing site design for mobile: Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 1: Adapting Grid960, Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 2: Touchscreens and Tables, Developing a Web Application with a native feel for Tablets

Syndicated 2012-07-24 12:17:13 from Don Marti

QoTD: Jason Pontin

"I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and print-like on something open, new, and digital."

— Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher, Technology Review

Syndicated 2012-07-20 00:44:11 from Don Marti

Security links

Some recent thought-provoking articles on security.

Instead of annoying CAPTCHAs, try "Design, Limit and Trapdoor" to limit damage from problem users: DLT is better than CAPTCHA

Roll your own middlebox: Low power silent firewall (and maybe help fix the broken Internet).

DRM is not really security, but often mixed up with it. Must-read from Charles Stross: More on DRM and ebooks. Joe Brockmeier: Publishers Starting to Reject e-Book DRM

Mozilla Persona gains features: Streamlining Login with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service APIs

Pay attention to that Persona thing. Doing passwords right is hard. Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature, How Companies Can Beef Up Password Security

Steven M. Bellovin on government-backed malware: Flame On! Two from Brian Krebs: EU to Banks: Assume All PCs Are Infected and How to Break Into Security, Schneier Edition.

This looks like a lot of work to do within existing web frameworks: Database level security in webapps (so do we need better frameworks?)

Syndicated 2012-07-19 23:58:51 from Don Marti

Advertising link frenzy

Some links that came up in a recent email thread on Internet advertising, and some more that should have.

Start with Charles Stross: The inadmissible assumptions. "All advertising tends towards the state of spam." (I would disagree with this as long as there are advertising media that can be made scarce and expensive. The challenge is how to make that possible. In my humble opinion, you can't de-spamify Internet advertising, and thereby make it valuable, without massive improvements in privacy tools. Quora thread: What is the percentage of Internet users that employ AdBlock Plus or similar ad blocking plugins?)

Good counterpoint from Terence Kawaja: The Golden Age of Advertising Technology. From the inside, it looks as if all is well. Local maxima or bust!

Somehow, it looks as if Microsoft, of all companies, is starting to get the online advertising problem. All I can see from the outside is a promising combination of Tracking Protection and other privacy-enhancing measures on the browser side, and utter FAIL on the advertising side. Anybody any closer to making sense of this? Or are the browser and ad tech groups so separated that it's pointless to talk about "Microsoft" as a decision-making entity here?

Zeroing in on DNT:1

Do Not Track: It’s the user’s voice that matters

IAB’s Rothenberg: ‘Microsoft’s DNT Reversal Makes No Sense’

SOURCE: Microsoft May Abandon The Ad Business Over IE10 Fiasco (MSFT)

The Display Ad Market Is In Big Trouble

Enough about Redmond, Washington. No discussion of advertising on the Internet would be complete without some mention of the ad-infested Android platform.

Two useful pieces from Horace Dediu: Android Economics and The Android Income Statement

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. Don Norman: Google doesn’t get people, it sells them.

Not all bad news, though: Android's Overblown Fragmentation Problem by Nick Bradbury makes a good point.

Get your head out of phone space anyway. Try The Phone Stack.

Some good discussion of that company your creepy ex-co-workers haven't killed yet. Michael Wolff: The Facebook Fallacy. "Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." Three follow-ups:

Doc Searls: After Facebook fails

Richard Stacy: Doc Searls, Michael Wolff and The Facebook Fairy

Benjamin Mako Hill: Why Facebook's Network Effects are Overrated

Robert Bruce says every company is a media company: Traditional Advertising is Truly Dead

Henry Blodget: Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse - Business Insider

Think Different: Orbitz Discriminates Against Mac Users ... Just Like It Should Be Doing

Jerry Neumann breaks down the money in targeting: Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it's worth

This makes sense to somebody, I guess: A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market. "Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way."

At least we have some promising news from the Journalism front. Frédéric Filloux: Lessons from ProPublica and How ProPublica changed investigative reporting. Just to show a good example of a ProPublica story: Inside the Investigation of Leading Republican Money Man Sheldon Adelson. Your winnings, sir.

Syndicated 2012-07-18 14:44:31 from Don Marti