When Brian Eno first moved to New York City in 1978, he felt that the words “here” and “now” carried different meanings for New Yorkers than for himself. “Here” meant “this room” and “now” meant “this five minutes”; connotations that felt confining to Eno compared to his European experiences where “here” minimally meant neighborhood. He observed that New York’s obsession with the latest news, the newest fashion, the next corporate earnings report and the speed of life itself indicated a mindset that produced an ever shortening perception of “now.” It seemed that this shrinking “now” exacerbated the contracting perception of “here” which was in turn leading people to care less about the things that existed outside of their personal here and now bubbles.

He dubbed these Amercian perceptions the “Small Here” and the “Short Now” and began to consider that the opposite of the Short Now –and perhaps it’s antidote– was the “Long Now.” Eno posits that as a product of the past and a progenitor of the future, “now” is an important moment that must be conscious of both the past and future. The extent of our ability to reach both forward and back defines the length of our Now.

From Eno’s The Big Here And Long Now essay:

The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows…

Meanwhile, we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded with pots of treasure. We face a future where almost anything could happen… Our astonishing success as a technical civilisation has led us to complacency –to expect that things will probably just keep getting better…

If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable - gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants.

How long is Eno’s Now? It extends 10,000 years into the future. Yes. Ten thousand years.

In the 01990’s (to use Long Now date nomenclature), a group of people coalesced around the idea of the Long Now, recognizing that our expectations for the future are defined by our actions in the present. They established the Long Now Foundation.

From a talk Eno gave at a Long Now Foundation Seminar in November 02003:

Now I suppose one of things about the Long Now idea is that we want to suggest that if we think long term we will think about building up cooperative relationships. If we think we’re all going to be here together for quite a long time, it might reward us to think differently about the types of relationships that we have…
We seem to have very little connection now with our possible descendants and our ancestors and we seem to not be able to make any good assumptions about how to make their world better. We’ve lost the ability of thinking long term, and it’s not surprising because the future changes so quickly. So we in the Long Now Foundation believe that these are issues that could somehow be dealt with.

The Foundation’s board is an impressive list, including Esther Dyson (multiple “ati” personality; literati, digerati, spacerati(?), etc.), Danny Hillis (inventor, pioneer in parallel supercomputing and past Disney Imagineer), Stewart Brand (co-founder of The WELL), Mitchell Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Kevin Kelly (founding executive editor of Wired magazine) and Brian Eno (musician and artist). The Long Now Foundation encourages us to look back 10,000 years to man’s first efforts at civilization: nascent technology use and the establishment of human settlements, and then asks us to reflect that time period forward beyond our present to 10,000 years into the future. This enormous “now” view places us at the midpoint of a 20,000 year cycle (a blip in geologic time!); setting the stage for “slower/better” thinking –for taking time to consider our actions and to proceed not as if we know the future, but that we expect the future to come.

The Foundation administers a number of projects designed to inspire people to stretch their own perception of now, consider the future, and act responsibly toward future generations. The projects include:

THE LONG NOW CLOCK (aka “the world’s slowest computer”)

Imagine a clock that ticks once a year, has a century hand advancing once every one hundred years and a cuckoo that appears each millennium. Imagine it operating for 10,000 years. Danny Hallis did just that in this 01995 essay. Later, Brian Eno devised an algorithm to produce over 3.5 millions melodic variations to a 10 note chime sequence that would provide a unique daily utterance from the clock during it’s 10,000 year lifespan. The Long Now Clock is to be monumental in size, longevity and mythology.

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think. [Long Now Foundation]

Destined for a limestone tomb in a Nevada mountaintop, the prototype is 8 feet tall; made of monel, stainless steel and brass; and currently held in the Science Museum in London. Pictures, Plans, and conceptual drawings can be found here.

THE ROSETTA DISK

The Rosetta Disk is a 15,000 page compendium designed to preserve knowledge about 2500 world languages; the majority of which are expected to disappear by the year 02100. Microscopically etched in nickel, these pages require simple optical magnification to be read –eliminating the fundamental problems of decoding 1’s and 0’s, obsolete data formats and deteriorating media. The disk carries a message in eight major world languages that reads: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The message text begins at a font size readable by the naked eye and quickly spirals inward to nano sized type, providing a clue to future readers who may not understand one of the eight languages by tempting them to magnify the text and reveal the contents. The Rosetta Disk has fascinating historical precedents. Like its namesake, the disk offers distant generations the opportunity to unlock potentially valuable information; perhaps bridging the divide of a future Dark Age.

LONG BETS

The stated purpose of the Long Bets Foundation is simply “to improve long term thinking.” A registered user can publish a prediction and wait for challenger to supply propose the amount of the wager. Once all terms are agreed upon, the Long Bets Foundation promises to hold the money and disburse the winnings to charity at the conclusion of the bet, be it two years away (the minimum) or two thousand years in the future (there is no maximum term).

Bets currently placed include:

• Jim Griffin (CEO, Cherry Lane Digital; founder, Evolab) bets $1000 in 02002 that: “A profitable video-on-demand service aimed at consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 02010″
• Mitchell Kapor bets $10,000 that “By 02029 no computer - or “machine intelligence” - will have passed the Turing Test” (futurist Ray Kurzweil bets against him).
• Esther Dyson bets $5,000 that “By 02012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as “the world leader in software development” or words to that effect.”
• A $1000 bet: “At least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150″
• A $400 bet: “By 02025 the scientific evidence of a hither-to-unknown large bi-pedal great ape will be sufficient to convince at least 50% of primatologists that a yeti/bigfoot-like creature exists.”
• A $400 bet: “By 02025, the states will have voted on at least one constitutional amendment to cede US federal power to a global government.”

Predictions waiting for bettors include:

• By 02025 at least 50% of all U.S. citizens residing within the United States will have some form of technology embedded in their bodies for the purpose of tracking and identification.”
• By 02050, at least two pan-regional currencies, modeled on the Euro, will be used in the world.
• By 02070, at least six countries will have officially implemented a 4-day working week.
• By 02063, There will be only three significant currencies used in the world. More than 95 % of the countries in the world will use one of them.
• By 02150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.

and…

• “The Long Bets Foundation will no longer exist in 02104.

01984 and Y2K - FAINT MEMORIES

Perhaps you’re old enough to remember when two dates of great cultural significance stood on the horizon: 01984 and 02000. For a long time one held fear; the other hope. 01984 passed and, seemingly unshackled and not too closely observed, we began to look toward the millennium. Hope turned into reconstituted World War II bomb shelters, powdered milk and freeze dried space food. Did we return to hope when fear fizzled at 12:01 AM on January 1, 02000?. Seems not. What new time mark is on your horizion? As a society, have we stopped looking at/for a particular future date with universal cross cultural significance? Does the year 02100 seem so impossibly far away that we don’t even put it on our personal horizon? What furture date do we look to? We don’t. And that’s the point of the Long Now. Learning to look forward again. In a way that goes beyond our our Small Here and Short Now time marks like retirement, getting the kids through college, TGIF, or watching the Super Bowl, to concepts of time and the future that are communal, cooperative, responsible, and hopeful.

CONFESSION
I know someone on a reality show, and I will go so far as to admit that I partake in a couple of reality show indulgences. My nano sized brush with reality greatness involves “America’s Next Producer” on the TV Guide Channel. Time Warner Cable seems to think that I get the TV Guide Channel, proudly displaying both the channel ID and the show in the onscreen guide, but all I can ever get is video black or local coverage of a neighborhood swim meet (there’s something mesmerizing about the long slow back and forth panning during the 10 year old medley relay –SOMEONE HELP ME!! YOUTUBE HAS EATEN THE DISCRIMINATING PORTION OF MY BRAIN –I’LL WATCH ANYTHING!). Back to reality.

GOING ONLINE

So I turn to TV Guide.com’s America’s Next Producer Episode Guide for some help. Here’s what I get: The video player doesn’t have a full screen mode. Image size is small compared to the increased size of most online video presentations. A button on the player control bar says “Launch Video & Photo Player” but has nothing to do with this player; opening a new player window with a different set of content from TV Guide. Confusing. Clicking on the “EP. 4″ tab brings up ANP Episode 4 with a text summary of the episode to the right. Additional content is available in a scrolling list immediately below the player. From there I can select a sneak preview of Episode 5 or any one of the previous episodes. If I click on one of the upper tabs for “EP 2″ to watch Episode 2 the text summary updates to the right, telling me what happened on the show. If I choose Episode 2 from the list below, the show summary does not update; leaving the last episode choice’s text in place. Poor UI design overall. The player is cranky. I’ve hit the site weekly to catch episodes 1-4. The player consistently performs poorly with Safari and Firefox; often failing to restart video playback after a pause. The further into a show, the more likely an unsuccessful pause, requiring a page reload AND a restart from the beginning of the show. There’s no shuttle feature although the interface implies it, so pausing to grab a beer at the 20 minute mark risks a full restart AND gets you a 20 minutes wait to get back to the point where you attempted a pause. NOT BEER FRIENDLY.

On the main ANP page, you can watch extras. After every clip the player becomes unresponsive; requiring me re-initialize the player by reloading the page. Perhaps this is a “Mac thing.” I tested with multiple versions of Safari and Firefox on multiple Apple computers. The show features Apple products prominently in nearly every shot. The least they could do is make the site work with the focus of a sponsor’s product placement.

ADVERTISING
Every episode stream begins with the same :30 TV spot –Jennifer Love Hewitt struggling with her bra straps and wishing she had a Hanes All Over Comfort Bra. TVG surely isn’t using pre-roll customization based on cookies, web bugs and behavioral tracking or even simple rotation. As much as I enjoy the shimmying, shilling Hewitt, this is a missed opportunity to hit my demo a little more accurately. I’m surprised that TVG is willing to air the one hour show with no commercials at all (coming in at just under 39 minutes). I’d have been OK with one spot per break which would still make me feel like I saved time over watching the show on cable.

If I can be so foolish as to suggest that the show itself has too little advertising, I’ll counter that by saying the extras on the ANP home page have too much. Each extra leads with a :30 spot and an TV Guide Broadband sounder and closes with a ANP sounder. The Episode Recaps, with just over a minute of content approach a 1:1 ratio of content to ads+IDs. The exit interviews and video blogs excerpts, though a little longer, less ad laden. Agencies have been comfortable with producing :15 spots for TV for quite some time. Give us :15’s for these web snippets –please.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Luckily for TVG, my acquaintance is moving on to Episode 5 and online viewing is my only option if I want to keep up the show. Don’t touch that pause button! And, get me a beer while you’re up.

FOLLOWUP

I failed to get this posted as soon as I’d hoped, so another episode has aired and the online viewing experience hasn’t improved. Video player performance and the episode guide interface remain a mess. Episode 5 doesn’t even show up among the upper selection tabs, but can be found in the secondary content list below; therefore the 100 word summary from Episode 4 is on display as Episode 5 plays. The stream failed three times; once with a sudden jump to a promo piece. Unable to shuttle forward into the show, I had invested more than the length of the show in terms of time and only seen half of it. I gave up and watched the 2 minute episode recap to find out who won the challenge and who was eliminated. If I didn’t have a connection with a contestant who’s still alive on this show, frustration would have trumped interest by now.

First, the press release regurgitation: “My Damn Channel launches an entertainment studio and new media platform created to empower artists to co-produce, distribute and monetize original, episodic video content. Comedians, musicians and filmmakers will develop short-form series and retain total artistic control of their own web channels.”

On to the content…

If you have the least bit of jazz in your soul, the visage of Don Was demands that he be called a hep cat. There’s an erudite coolness about him. In an online video marketplace where everyone is convinced that the answer is to amuse people to death, his contribution is a welcome respite. Some are discounting him as though the implied past tense means something, but take a look at the people he’s worked with and then tell me he can’t bring something interesting to the party for a wide range of tastes for many segments to come. It’s not an interview; it’s hangin’ out –and more; vintage clips: Iggy Pop from ‘89, Clapton from ‘68; Albert King from ‘80. Before you starting thinking it’s all “old” stuff, there’s new music, too. Enough. Go see for yourself; Was is a hit.

Harry Shearer’s initial offering is about as low key as you can get; literally. Shearer conjures up Dick Cheney grumbling out a torch song for Scooter Libby, “No Cooler For The Scooter.” About Libby, he croons, “He’s still free to bend over. Scooter’s rescued from the joint.” then repeats it, lounge style, to make sure we get the double entendre, “Scooter’s rescued from the joint.” Manna for the “Le Show” crowd. Again, an unexpected calm in the noisy cavern that is web comedy. Maybe this whole damn thing IS going to be different than the rest. But… why Cheney & Libby? It feels a less current; less immediate; like well trod ground. I dislike Cheney as much as anybody, but now that the approval ratings are permanently shattered, do we need to raise the cudgel for another blow with so many others worthy of a beating? The 2008 campaigners smell like fresher meat.

The third launch day offering is “Shelly,” the first of ten webisodes of “Wainy Days” by David Wain. At four minutes each, ten webisodes is less time than two airings of that “show about nothing.” Wain manages to get me slightly interested in the show (Elizabeth Banks sure helps) –enough to come back and see what happens next but I’ll agree with one commenter who expressed that if he doesn’t catch me at Episode II, I wont be back for III. Four minutes is a challenge: do you make it all about Wain or try to get viewers to invest in the development of the supporting cast (can you even develop multiple characters in four minutes)? Dunno. Maybe this is going to be a “different chick every couple of weeks” thing. If it is, there will be a many disappointed viewers because a lot of comment posters are banking on seeing Elizabeth for a while. It’s nice to see something on the web using people who deserve titles like DP and editor.

An Andy Milonakis channel is to launch in August. MyDamnChannel’s valiant effort to raise the IQ of the room with Don Was and Harry Shearer is likely to be undone by Milonakis. Let’s just say he’s an acquired taste; maybe like Aussies and Vegemite –you have to have grown up that way.

Is there a formula that explains the audience overlap between these channels? Only Rob Barnett knows. It will be interesting to what artists he adds to the roster. It had better happen quick. I don’t know if there’s enough there to satisfy the different niches established by the current foursome in the lineup. After watching the available material, I instantly had a craving for Dave Chappelle. Bringing back Chappelle to sketch comedy via MDC would be an event of mind blowing proportions. Oh well, that’s probably a half baked dream.

MDC’s remaining content is rounded out by promos –lots of them. “Landlord 2027” is the keystone, a clever nod to Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord” with a song, a dance, promo copy and two left turns. It’s chock full o’ nuts. The two left turns are funny and crop up elsewhere on the site. It’s good, but if treated like the Energizer bunny, too many left turns start feeling like going around in a circle. When pleasing the web, a stream of funny stuff often trumps one really funny gag. Keep them coming.

The site is, of course, supported by advertising. None of the video clips lead with annoying :30 TV spots re-purposed from broadcast television. That’s GOOD. Watching Don Was’ long interview in eight separate four minute chunks was tolerable, but if I had been forced to wait through a pre-video commercial eight times to get the whole thing, I’d be soured. The lack of a full 32 minute Don Was feed makes me suspicious, though.

Quick takes:

–
PCRQ (pop culture reference quotient): .0074
–

DISCLAIMER: I know some of the folks at Big Fat Brain who worked on some of the material for MyDamnChannel. I didn’t know when it was going to go live; I just knew that since they had disappeared from my personal radar for a while that they were holed up somewhere battling the grueling days & nights that a launch requires. I don’t know Rob Barnett; have never met him; he doesn’t know me. I travel with underlings.

Now that public discourse on the important matters of the day takes place online, the magical democratizing power of the internet has transformed the world into an egalitarian utopia where every idea is represented… where thoughtful discourse breaks the sound bite barrier of talking head TV… where where everyone has a voice… –well everyone with enough disposable income to afford high speed access, a computer and copious leisure time to surf, spout off, post inane videos and buy porn.

That pretty much means white guys.

Traditional print and television news organizations haven’t been known as havens for “unrepresented” folks standing outside; looking nearly as white and male as our legislators when taking a top down view. Does the “new” online news media look any more diverse? Let’s take a quick look at The Huffington Post.

A tally of The Huffington Post’s blog posts from July 30th and July 31st 2007 reveals:

In two days, 69% of all blog posts (91 of 131) were by male writers.

One half of all posts (66 of 131) were in the POLITICS category.

• 79% of posts tagged POLITICS (52 of 66) were by male writers
• 83% of BUSINESS posts (5 of 6) were by male writers
• 83% of ENTERTAINMENT (10 of 12) posts were by male writers
• 66% of MEDIA posts (12 of 18) were by male writers
• 41% of LIVING NOW posts (12 of 29) were by male writers

Look again at the picture. Is this the new-old look of progressive online media? I think that it’s safe to say that compared to Congress’ figures (8% African American, 5% Hispanic) that The Huffington Post, though providing more examples of ethnic variety (1 Native American, 1 Libyan born writer to pull a couple from several), is overall not any more representative of the US population than our elected officials.

Although maligned, the 2000 Census figures stand as one measure of racial proportions in the United States:

• 69.1% White
• 12.7 Hispanic
• 12.3 African American
• 3.7 Asian
• 2.4 Mutli-racial

A Neilsen Net Ratings report offers this:

The overall unique audience to the top 10 online newspapers skewed male, with 60 percent men and 40 percent women. Among newspaper blog pages, this skew intensified, with 66 percent men and 34 percent women.

Neilsen expects the gap to widen. That’s HuffPo’s audience they’re talking about. Maybe they’re right on target with 69% of all blogs entries posted by males. And with 79% of the political posts penned by men, Congress seems appropriately covered as well. If most assumptions are right about the makeup of affluent web users, maybe the paleness is on target, too.

The Huffington Post continues it’s impressive growth; widely reported (everyone’s reading HP press releases, no doubt) to attract over 3 million unique visitors and 70 million page views a day. They have made moves toward acting like a more traditional news outlet while preserving their progressive blogger cred; presumably an advantage over offline publishers venturing online who know how to manage a print run but are uncomfortable with the feral world of user comments and unleashed bloggers.

Commerce is now firmly rooted in the web and those with profit interests are targeting the majority of web users: white guys with money. Publishers of all types of media are now pursuing this prized demographic. You can talk about long tails and niches, but the reality is that the major information portals are lenses colored by those who not only provide focus but choose the subject. Does diversity among these gatekeepers matter in the online world where the freeing power of anonymity was supposed to erase our desire to categorize and bring people of all races, creeds, classes and genders together on a big happy playground of the willfully blind? Darn that hyped up web; it’s merely another version of the real world.

How white and male is the web? Look at the picture above again. Is that a mirror? You tell me.

Who’s keeping tabs on you?

One web segment, online publishing, is particularly interested in establishing your demographic data. Coming from the physical world of print, where limited space props up the price of ads and reader demographics add value, their entry into virtual publication scares the ink right off of their fingers; online, users appear anonymous and the inventory is limitless. Traditional video media purveyors share the same concerns. Their saviours are the cookie and the web beacon who together quietly make note of you as you travel the web and construct a profile based upon your habits. The more clearly a publisher can identify you, the more effective their ad placement and the more valuable the ad’s delivery to the advertiser.

Before we get to who, a quick read on how:

COOKIES

A cookie is a text string (typically unreadable by mere humans) that is delivered by a server to your browser which then stores the file for later use when accessing that same server. It’s how Amazon.com calls you by name and Google remembers your searches for vegemite recipes and incontinence supplies. Despite the implication of software vendors hawking the latest panacea for your PC’s ill behavior, cookies are incapable of executing code, acting like a virus, retrieving personal information from the depths of your computer and are neither popups nor alien mind control implants.

Wikipedia entry: HTTP cookie

WEB BEACONS (aka WEB BUGS)

A web bug is an element of a web page that, in order for the page to be rendered, must be loaded from a server (typically a third party server), such as a simple 1 pixel by 1 pixel image or certain HTML objects. When the request for the element is made, the server supplying the element can record information associated with the request: the IP address, time, presence of cookies, browser type, and URLs of the page and element. Assigning unique identifying information via a cookie allows the third party to track the user, usually without their knowledge of a third party being involved.

• Wikipedia entry: web beacon (web bug)
• One source for web bug statistics

TRACKING YOUR ONLINE BEHAVIOR

Again, exactly WHO is keeping tabs on you? Companies with expertise in “behavioral tracking” (aka “BT”), data collection methods, and marketing analysis. The most prominent belong to an industry trade group, the Network Advertising Initiative, self defined as “a vigorous advocate for consumer privacy and responsible online marketing standards and practices… committed to consumer education.” The NAI lists these “Full Compliance Members”:

• Advertising.com, whose Lightningcast (see video about video) offers “pre-roll video, in-banner video - even clickable, out-of-the-box formats for those without commercial spots. For publishers, we fill your premium video inventory with premium video advertising - ensuring you make the most of your video content.”
• Atlas offers a product dubbed VIBE (Visitor Interest Behavioral Engine)
• Doubleclick gained recent attention for the whopping 3.1 billion dollar price tag put on their acquisition by Google.
• x+1 boasts a Progressive Optimization Engine that “leverages sophisticated mathematical models to make optimal segmentation and targeting decisions for online marketers. POE™’s added-value is derived from its ability to make actionable decisions from massive amounts of complex, interacting data. Using a wide variety of data sources, POE™ profiles end-users and anonymously tracks their online behavior and responsiveness.” Whew! Hand them the prize for wonkiest promotional copy.
• Revenue Science, Inc. publishes an extensive client list. Their competitors choose to be more discreet.
• SpecificMEDIA, Inc., whose targeting method “predicts each user’s age and gender based on his or her past online viewing habits… assigns a score related to the likelihood of a purchase in over 3,300 product and service categories… detects each user’s location by IP address and gives advertisers the ability to geographically target down to the zip code level.”
• TACODA, Inc. (just acquired by AOL) declares that they are “the first and largest behavioral targeting advertising network reaching more than 120 million people across 31 discrete audience segments every month.” Their home page presents a parade of demographic profiles accompanied by smiling faces. Bonus points for providing an easily noticed opt-out link on every page of their website.
• 24/7 Real Media Inc. asks, “Would you like to reach single women who own cars and are sports-enthusiasts in Chicago, or maybe Japanese teens that live in the city and buy DVDs?” responding with, “Whoever you want to reach, we have targeting down to a science.”
• Acerno is, according to their site, “reaching over 80% of the internet population on a monthly basis,” asserting that “it’s one thing to locate customers who have actually been to your site. It’s quite another to find the ones who are right for your site, but haven’t yet been there. We’re able to discover those customers through our co-op of like-minded businesses.”
• SafeCount uses cookies in connection with their questionmarket.com site to track your exposure to specific advertisements and correlate that data with market surveys. Safecount provides this page where a Safecount cookie’s cryptic text data, which contains “whether or not a particular ad was displayed on your computer, the time and date that ad was delivered, and whether or not you agreed to take a market research survey,” is decoded and displayed for you.
• AlmondNet “partner[s] with Data-Owners & Media-Owners to facilitate the delivery of relevant, targeted (based on recently-conducted searches for products/services) ads to consumers wherever they go…”

As one gets deeper into this subject, the rewards of cross pollinating online tracking data start to emerge. Think carefully before you choose to accept compensation for allowing a firm like Relevant Knowledge to gather more detailed data about you or install proprietary software on your computer to track you in ways that cookies and web beacons cannot. There are spyware concerns to be considered. See the wrist slap here.

FINDING OUT IF YOU’RE BEING TRACKED AND OPTING OUT

The NAI hosts an opt-out page. Here, you can not only choose to opt out of targeted advertising from each NAI member individually, you can identify whether or not you currently have active cookies from each of the ten member companies. If you want to know if you’re the subject of behavioral tracking, click here.

The NAI site says, “The NAI Opt-out Tool was developed in conjunction with our member advertising networks with the express purpose of allowing consumers to “opt out” of the targeted advertising delivered by these networks.” The process of opting out places a special opt out cookie in your browser’s cookie stash. Hmmmmm… you can opt out of targeted advertising, but did anyone say anything about opting out of behavioral tracking? Perhaps the NAI is taking the stance that if you want to join the tin-foil-hat club they’ll make it easy; “wear this Reynolds Wrap masterpiece and we’ll be able to see you wherever you go.” –wink, wink. Dunno. Would it NOT be of interest to these companies to collect data on how many site visitors have chosen to opt out?

CONTROLLING COOKIES; TAKING A PRIVACY STANCE

As an alternative to the shiny chapeau identifying you as an anti-social, you can take control of your browser’s features and preferences to reject cookies, delete them, or activate temporary privacy modes. Apple’s Safari offers a “Private Browsing” feature; a mode that rejects cookies and keeps no local history of pages visited or auto-fill information from online forms. You must clear your history, browser cache and cookies to before entering Private Browsing mode to start with an entirely clean slate. You could turn the feature on and off as you navigated to sites where you desire the convenience factor of cookies, but that likely to get tiresome. Like all modern browsers, Safari provides a preference to reject all cookies. Firefox provides additional options; the ability to create a custom list of sites for which you will “Block, Allow, or Allow for Session [only]” the use of cookies. Another feature allows cookies to be dealt with one by one, providing a popup with options for each cookie that a site or page attempts to deliver to your browser. Torture by tedium. I find this is an intolerable solution.

Refusing a cookie doesn’t make you completely anonymous on the web; your IP address is easily determined and provides clues to your location. Many online forums log IP addresses to deter abuses. For complete and total anonymity, you’ll need to venture into things like TOR and start geeking up on subject like proxies, SOCKS implementation, etc. I lose interest when looking that deeply into the innards of what really goes on in the nether world of bit wrangling. If you need the dark sunglasses and trenchcoat that badly, the info is out there.

FINDING OUT MORE

If you REALLY want to get into the issues of advertising, adware, spyware, etc. from an academic standpoint, look up Ben Edelman. To lift from his bio, he’s an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School whose current research includes analyzing methods and effects of spyware, with a focus on installation methods and revenue sources. He has documented advertisers supporting spyware, advertising intermediaries funding spyware, affiliate commission fraud, and click fraud. His academic research focuses on Internet advertising. Ben’s recent academic work also includes designing compensation structures to deter advertising fraud, and critiquing online “safety” certifications that fail to adequately protect users.

If you like digging, the websites of the companies listed above reveal their various approaches to providing value to online media publishers and their advertisers. In addition to carefully crafted privacy statements, nearly all have pages dedicated to directly allaying any privacy concerns among consumers, stressing the anonymous character of their data collection.

The information is out there on the web. Read as much as you care to, then determine your privacy needs. With the combination of browser prefs, cookie deletion (either wholesale or selectively), opting out, and cookie identification web pages like that provided by the NAI, users have a tool set that allows them to establish a level of cookie acceptance that matches their desired level of privacy. A few studies on cookie deletion show a relatively narrow range of results: essentially, that between 3 and 4 out of 10 users delete cookies monthly. This clearly skews the data on sites that count unique visitors. I haven’t found data on how regular cookie deletion may skew the results of behavioral tracking, but at least one BT company claims that all it needs is two weeks worth of browsing to create an accurate profile.

“And you may ask yourself, ‘How do I work this?’”

Better yet, ask yourself, “Why video?”

Far too many out there with an IP address and something to say are weakening their message by using video. Yes, weakening their message. They are either afraid to let words stand on their own, crave the ease of the red button, or have been swindled into believing that video magically makes things better.

Consider Scott Karp, poor guy. He’s a writer. A good one. And admits that he’s no video blogger. But the Wall Street Journal Online asked for a video piece. Ouch. This one doesn’t even recognize that it’s a video piece. It’s merely an essay read to the camera.

The Marty Feldman in the headlights effect kicks in. Sitting in a hotel room reading essay copy into your laptop’s built in camera is a unique exercise in frustration. You CAN’T look directly into the camera and read from the screen no matter how wide you open your eyes and force yourself not to blink. I admit that I’m picking on the worst of the lot that WSJ Online posted for their “Happy Blogiversary” homage to ten years of blogging. But really… It’s THE WALL STREET JOURNAL! To be accurate, it’s The Wall Street Journal Online. (Cool, we’re online. That means video!). The other videos weren’t as bad as Scott’s, but the interesting question is, “Was there an editor (in publishing terms, or a producer in video terms) assigned to this article?” Why didn’t an editor/producer ask Karp to try another take or find a stinky kid [TM] with a video camera? Would the print version of the WSJ or the NYT have sent out a photographer to get a still photo or asked the subject of an article to hold a digital camera at arm’s length in bad light and snap a lo res crooked JPEG? (maybe hand you a hat pin and foil to punch out your dotted self portrait). Would they have printed an awful photo? Why publish and awful video? The reality is that The WSJ needed content with which to entice readers; content they cannot get in the printed edition: video. You be the judge. If you had tossed The WSJ into the trash at the end of the workday, trekked home to a freshly cracked Stella and fired up the iMac to get to this bonus content, would you have considered it worth the bandwidth or would you have rather just read the video comments of the bloggers as insets to the primary article?

For a moment, the WSJ Online lapsed into the mantra that if it’s video it’s inherently worthy, and bought into the corollary: video belongs online and if you’re online video belongs. The choice to use video is simple: If it doesn’t enhance, don’t use it. If the content isn’t compelling, then it doesn’t measure up as bonus content that will make consumers accept a future invitation from the printed page to the rendered page.

I like NewTeeVee.com. There’s some good information there from a collection of writers, though the site is also snared in the need to be yet another online outlet for THAT-tube, et al. Jackson West gets caught in the middle with a piece that started out as a humble text entry, but never quite got to mature into a real piece of video. What we get is the “we’ll cure the boredom of the standard static face-cam closeup with a locked down medium shot” approach. Help! At least we get some B-roll and piano music. Could the video have been worse? Much. Better? Certainly. Why criticize? Because it should have been better.

Why should it or anything else be “better?”

Because if I or anyone else is going to make one of the 127,498,367,912 destinations on the internet a regular haunt, I must develop an expectation for the level of quality that I’m going to receive there. THAT is the live or die factor online; whether or not a person can return to a site/portal/brand and have expectations for type and quality of content consistently met. Offline entities embarking on online adventures need to keep this in mind. Clearly, the WSJ Online doesn’t know how to maintain (or care to oversee via an editor/producer) a threshold for marginally acceptable video. THAT-tube doesn’t care. I’m OK with that latter’s position, but I expect more of the former. The old guard, traditional, offline media entities are, taken as a whole, presenting content just above cable access level production values. Many new online startups who, as ventures born of the media savvy generation ought to be more in tune with video media aesthetics, aren’t doing much better. Does it matter? Explorations for another post.

Both of these writers acted on the words of others, as in “I got asked to make a video” or “I was encouraged to produce it as a video.” They should have asked, “Why a video?” or taken the steps toward better content and their publishers should have established the threshold.

“Just put ketchup on it,” may be a cure for powdered eggs at summer camp or mom’s mystery meatloaf, but as the saviour of the culinary world, it’s… well… it’s merely ketchup; a tasty condiment with some masking properties. “Just turn on the camera and read it” doesn’t even rise to the base level of ketchup’s masking utility. The camera cannot magically cover anything in video goodness no matter how generously slathered; quite the opposite –the camera reveals.

Oh well, it’s hard to blame today’s talking heads for their shortcomings when we’ve had 29 years of Andy Rooney and whines of this (m) ilk. At least he’s well lit. You know what I mean.

PCRQ (pop culture reference quotient) = .0032