On May 13 last year, we got a fairly hefty packet of junk mail inviting us to apply for Discover cards. Inside was a plastic replica card.
We got another one on May 18. And two more on May 25. And another on May 27, followed by one more on May 28.
After that, things settled down a bit. Another offer on June 15, then a final one on August 8.
So, 8 copies of the junk mail, all to the same address. It’s worse than AOL CDs. I wonder how much money Discover must be wasting?
AOL patented Instant Messaging.
It is hence painfully obvious that the US Patent Office either isn’t concerned with prior art, or lacks anybody with any knowledge of computer systems before 1997. I’m not sure which is more depressing.
I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the amount of money and resources AOL wastes trying to get me to subscribe to their service. The latest gimmick is that they’re not just sending me CDs… they’re sending me CDs in a metal tin, decorated with an American eagle and a border of stars, styled like a US coin or something. It’s the most appalling waste.
I mean, let’s be clear about something: If AOL was the only Internet Service Provider in the world, I’d set up a BBS for my friends or arrange a UUCP feed for my e-mail.
I just got e-mail from a random AOL account containing nothing but a small JPG of a woman giving some guy a blow job. Looking at the raw text, it claimed to be a .WAV file, but had a .SCR extension; and it was sent by some sucker on a cable modem in Canada.
No virus code, as far as I can tell. These viruses are getting downright bizarre.
[Inside] reports that it and Brill’s Content are to close. Blame is assigned to personality clashes, economy downturns, too many editors, and so on. The simple truth, however, is that Brill’s Content sucked.
It was a great idea, and the first few issues were good. Before long, though, it became obvious that it was a big club newsletter for Steve Brill and his friends—there was a fawning interview with Steve Case of AOL, MSNBC was picked as Best Internet News Site (a truly laughable assertion), and so on.
I’ve talked to several people who were subscribers, and they all say the same thing. It turned into exactly what it purported to criticize. When Brill started running advertorial for his Contentville venture, and printing part of an article with “Subscribe to Contentville to read the rest”, I decided it was time to stop reading. I let my subscription lapse. I imagine all the other charter subscribers did too.
The sad thing is, there ought to be a media analysis magazine, and the death of Brill’s Content will probably mean that nobody else tries it for years.
I got in to work, and my boss passed me in the hallway and said something about terrorist activity and a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I thought he was talking about a little Cessna or something, so I got in and sat and started on my coffee, glanced over my e-mail, and then hit the BBC News web site to see what was going on. I soon had the live BBC News video stream going, and sat watching it in disbelief. I cried a little. I wanted to hug someone, but the only person around was our Latvian admin assistant Evija, and I decided that would probably be a bad idea.
I sat on three separate chat networks (AOL IM, DALnet IRC and our internal one), passing information back and forth and putting together a summary as things happened. Working together with people on IRC, we collected information from several channels of news media, filtered out the contradictory stuff, and noted what was confirmed and by whom. Since a lot of people internally seemed unable to get to news sites, I also posted screenshots from the video. It reminded me a little of Tienanmen Square and the shelling of the Russian Parliament—in both of those cases, I got the news from the Internet.
Around 11, my boss said that unless there was a compelling reason to be in the office, senior management was advising us to go home. The Hancock and Prudential buildings had been evacuated. What with two of the planes being Boston ones, I think it was probably justified paranoia. So I left the office and walked back towards Kendall. I had a bad feeling about the T initially, and instead went to the MIT lunch trucks and had something to eat. After that, the red line seemed pretty empty, so I chanced it and got home around 12:30.
Sara was watching the news on NECN, which was OK, but really full of wild speculation. We switched to BBC America, which was giving over its entire lunchtime news slot to the… crisis? disaster? outrage? I’m having trouble finding the right word here. We made various attempts to call friends and acquaintances in Manhattan, and I sat online with the ThinkPad. Eventually people showed up online and we were able to confirm that they were OK; the phone system stayed useless all afternoon. I couldn’t reach my mother either—I knew she’d be worrying, as I’ve made business trips to IBM Madison Avenue in the past. I sent SMS messages, but they didn’t arrive. Finally e-mail made it.
Right now I’m mostly feeling apprehensive. A lot of people online seemed furiously angry, patriotic, and ready to string up anyone the government identified as responsible. Maybe I’m too Zen; I just didn’t get angry. My feeling is that anger is inappropriate and unhelpful. But right now, it seems like I’m in a tiny minority, and that probably means a big crackdown on immigrants and troublemakers—and of course, I’m both. Sure, I have white skin, but bad laws are color-blind. The trial by media has already started—I’ve seen pundits reminding everyone how previous terrorist actions have been carried out by resident aliens. Politicians are talking about “eradicating”, and language like that from people in power always makes me nervous.
So I’ve been offline, trying to get away from it all. The next few days are going to be bad—endless speculation will be the order of the day. Was it Osama bin Laden? Was it a CIA conspiracy to introduce martial law, confiscate firearms, and place the USA under the control of FEMA operatives in black UN helicopters? Who should the drunken gangs be beating up?
Banner ads don’t work. Everyone knows it. The online advertising industry, however, doesn’t want to admit it.
Just a few days ago there was a big meeting of members of the Internet Advertising Bureau—a self-selected group of big web sites and ad banner hucksters, including Yahoo, AOL, DoubleClick and Excite.
These towering intellects have decided that the reason ad banners don’t work is that they’re not big enough. So they’ve decided on some new standards for ad banner sizes. 250×250 pixels.
Well, obviously if I have that staring me in the face I’ll have no option but to click through and buy the product. If you want a real example, look at C|net—I’ll certainly try not to from now on…
There’s also a new 120×600 humongo-ad they’ll be crapping all over web pages; I’ll spare you a demo of that one. The new ads contribute an extra 6K each to the size of the page. At modem speeds, that’s an extra second or two per ad on the load time, assuming the Internet’s not congested. I can hardly wait—or rather, I’m going to have to.
Still, I can’t help thinking that they’re missing something. Monday I actually saw something interesting mentioned on a banner ad. I clicked on it, and got… a completely blank page.
See, for privacy and security reasons I browse with cookies and JavaScript turned off by default. I only enable them for a specific web site if there’s a good reason to do so. Unfortunately, most banner ad firms demand that they be able to track everything about you and capture your e-mail address using cookies and JavaScript. If you refuse their demands, they simply refuse to take you to the advertised page. So in all the times I’ve actually clicked on banner ads, rarely have I ended up being offered the product or service advertised.
In this case, I hunted down the web site of the company paying for the ad, and sent them a note to tell them that they were being ripped off by their advertising agency. But the point is: If advertising agencies want to increase the effectiveness of banner ads, they could be a little less obnoxious and aggressive and demanding, and start by making sure the damn things actually work.