Archive for August, 2007
Holy shit, Barbie
Many years ago, I was walking through Glasgow’s famous Barras market and listening to the inspired bullshit traders used to flog their tat. One man in particular made me laugh: he was selling lifelike dolls, and began making stuff up to attract potential customers. “She walks!” he bellowed. “She talks! She farts! She pees!”
Of course, since then toy manufacturers *have* made dolls with bodily functions, but I never thought I’d see the day when toy firms tried to persuade kids that the must-have toy of the season was a shitting dog.
My Sky+ was on the fritz this morning so I rebooted it, which meant waiting for a bit until it picked up the satellite channels. Kids’ TV was on, and it cut to an advertising break. The first ad was for Barbie, who now comes complete with Tanner. Tanner is a dog, and if you feed him little brown biscuits he ejects them from his arse. As this is a responsible toy, you also get a poop scoop and bin that you use to pick up and store his bum biscuits.
What sort of world do we live in where this kind of stuff isn’t just invented, but manufactured in huge quantities and advertised on TV?
Why Firefox is blocked dot com
Some webmasters are apparently redirecting Firefox users to WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com, although I’ve no idea how many sites are doing it [Update: as Charles Arthur points out in the comments, the answer is "one"]. So what’s it all about? The evils of Adblock Plus.
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software.
Blimey. As someone who (a) runs ads on a website and (b) loves AdBlock Plus with all my heart, I think they’ve lost the plot.
Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..
The spending thing is a fair point - the people who use ABP aren’t the sort of people who’ll be clicking on your ads anyway - but given the insignificantly small cost of serving up web content to visitors, there’s no reason to block them either. If you’re serving up high-bandwidth content such as video, stick the ads in your clips. You can’t ABP that.
I don’t know about other ABP users, but for me I use the plugin not to block adverts, but to block bad adverts. You know the ones: the noisy, irritating in-your-face ones that jump in front of the content, blast you with sound effects and generally get in the way. The ones that replicate the real-world experience of trying to read while an idiot screams in your ear and pokes you in the stomach.
If site ads didn’t treat me with contempt, I wouldn’t use an ad-blocker. So in some respects ABP is the symptom, not the problem: people are blocking ads because some sites can’t or won’t use them responsibly.
I’ve been thinking about advertising a lot lately, because I use ads to pay the hosting bills. The revenue isn’t much, but the hosting bills aren’t much either. I’m quite happy with that, but I do wrestle with the dilemma of how best to do it without alienating people (and without dumb-as-rocks contextual ads promoting the very people I slag off in blog entries).
I’ve come to the conclusion that affiliate ads are the way to go - a kind of online tip jar, if you like. So for example if you like the sound of BioShock - which you should - or this autumn’s Girls Aloud album - which you should - and my blabs convince you to buy them, clicking on the Play.com ad over there means if you buy them from that site, 10p to 40p goes into the web hosting tip jar.
(incidentally the ads so far are just me mucking about - I’m going to whittle them down so the only ads are for sites I actually use or things I think are good, eg Future’s mag subscriptions, Play.com, things like that. I haven’t had time to do that yet)
What I’m not sure about yet is the best way to do it. I know I don’t want banners, or invasive Flash ads or anything like that, so for now I’m experimenting with relatively small, easily blockable box ads kept separate from the actual blog content. That way, people who find the ads annoying can zap ‘em with ABP, or just use the ad-free RSS feeds to access the site. The other alternative was to use text links, which is less visually disruptive but which wouldn’t be blockable. What do you think?
What I don’t really understand is the attitude behind WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com, though. With any site, a significant number of your non-Firefox, non-ABP-using visitors don’t give a shite about your ads and won’t click on them. Why single out the Firefox users and cause bad feeling by locking them out?
Wit, talent and style? On a satellite music channel?
Watching music television is usually a profoundly depressing experience, but I stumbled across something wonderful this evening while trying to see the new Girls Aloud video: “Be good or be gone” by Fionn Regan.
Doing something interesting with music videos is tough enough at the best of times, but when you’re making a video for a bowl-cutted solo artist with an acoustic guitar it’s damn near impossible. And yet, the video is fantastic: Regan sings his song in a church, in a lift, in a street… the location changes every few seconds and the sound changes too, so one minute it’s dry and claustrophobic, the next there’s a cavernous reverb as he sings in a church pew, then he’s drowned out by a passing bus and so on.
I’ve no idea what Regan’s other stuff is like, but this video takes the potentially unwatchable and turns it into something really rather lovely.
ASA clouts Clarins for phone fear nonsense
Remember those Clarins ads for face cream to protect you against evil electromagnetic fields? They’ve just been spanked by the advertising standards authority.
We told Clarins not to state that electromagnetic waves generated by modern-day devices or domestic communications equipment could damage or age skin or to imply anti-ageing and pro-health efficacy claims for Expertise 3P unless they held robust scientific evidence to support that. We also told them not to make an undue appeal to consumers fear of the harm that could be caused by man-made electromagnetic waves.
[Via The Inquirer]
One for the podcasters/music makers
Decent microphones are brilliant. Laptop inputs, not so brilliant. The answer? A proper mic with a USB connection instead of a traditional mic plug. The one I fancy is the CO1U by Samson - fifty quid for a condenser mic that makes you sound like God is a right bargain, I reckon. I’m ordering one next time I get paid.
The Bourne Ultimatum
…is superb. I’m trying to think of any other trilogy where all three movies were great, and I’m coming up with nowt. LOTR doesn’t count - it’s disqualified on grounds of (a) numb arse syndrome and (b) the final film going on and on and on and on and…
Advertising
Google’s context-sensitive ads on this very blog have been annoying me for a while, so I’ve dumped them in favour of something a bit more relevant (and UK-centric). The ads are coming via Affiliate Window, who handle the affiliate scheme for Future’s various magazines - I figured it might be an idea to promote the magazines I write for and get a cut, but I’m waiting to be approved on that. Which seems a bit weird to me. Ho hum.
As ever, if you don’t like ‘em they’re easily blocked with your friendly neighbourhood AdBlock Plus.
Making rock in the hot sun
Philosophyfootball.com’s 1977 range helps fund musical instruments for prisoners and demonstrates that you have superb taste in music. What’s not to like?
Basically a cut of the profits go to the Jail Guitar Doors charity, which provides musical instruments for prisoner rehabilitation. According to founder Billy Bragg, re-conviction rates for people involved in the project are 10-15%, compared to the national average of 61%.
Bioshock is beautiful (and bloody scary)
If you can stomach the download - it’s over a gigabyte, and thanks to my patchy wi-fi it took eight hours to download - the Xbox 360 demo of Bioshock is stunning. You get about an hour of gameplay, and if that’s representative of the game as a whole it’s going to be incredible. The ruined art deco environments are beautiful, the gameplay’s exciting and the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling.
Please please please let the game be as good as the demo.
I hate to say I told you so: DRM strikes again
Google Video is shutting its download shop. Thanks to DRM, anyone who’s bought downloads from it will soon discover that their videos have ceased to be, are ex-videos, etc etc etc.