AdAge has a very good new redesign with a most important change: No more registration and no need to subscribe to read the articles. Bravo. I want to quote from and link to AdAge pieces almost every week but the only way I’ve been able to do it (as I did below) is to retype a graph. Now you, too, can follow the upheaval in this most fascinating industry. Good move. And thanks.
There’s still a fair amount of paid wall left. I tried reading a Steve Garfield column and hit the intercept.
Accoding to an editor’s note:
Yeah, and it seems like most of American Demographics isn’t free, either, even to registered users…
OK. Bravo. Some of the site is free.
Note however that most of Ad Age is mired in the past glories of advertising as if it was still 1998.
Interactive is a “special section.†Huh…. Google did over $6 billion in ad sales last year. I don’t have the time to look up all of the numbers of the interactive industry but you know what I am talking about.
Most advertising professionals have never even bothered to try to figure out how to do a Google ad. Not even bothered. Dig?
I read Ad Age. But when was the last time I was stimulated to write a letter to the editor? I’d rather write here.
Ad Age = Stimulation free zone.
There is a strain of person in the US that is fundamentally optimistic about government. I think Jeff belongs to this category. Then there are those who think that governments, like all organizations, ultimately are more concerned for their own well being and survival than for those they are supposed to serve.
History has shown that the pessimists are right entirely too often. I gave a historical example in this essay:
Surveillance vs Civil Liberties
But, we don’t have to look far back to see current abuses. Not only do we have the NSA issue in the news, but there have been other stories about the CIFA program of DoD. During the Republican convention in NYC there were undercover police acting as agents provocateurs in the crowd of protestors. There were mass arrests on trumped up charges that were later dismmised. The ACLU is also involved in a series of cases over surveillance and, perhaps, physical break ins of activists and their lawyers.
So, Jeff may want to think that cookies are benign, but they allow for detailed tracking of people’s behavior without them understanding the consequences. Google already uses cookies to keep track of every search you make, for example. Notice that the existence of this information has inspired the government to ask for it.
The point of my essay, cited above, is to point out how quickly surveillance of external enemies gets redirected towards spying on domestic political opponents. There is no reason to think that our government won’t abuse civil liberties in the future either.