Update to previous blog entry: CNN.com has closed its open chat rooms and has decreased the number of active message boards. This follows last week's story of MSNBC.com closing its discussion areas, preferring to send all community traffic to MSN. (news courtesy of Online Community Report)

I guess when people are taking news into their own hands and being much more savvy in discerning media spin, who needs to use communities run and censored by the mass market media?

On tonight's 20/20, John Stossel reports on price controls and other important issues in the Drug Industry. He also interviews an AIDS activist (an activist for AIDS?) who says "we certainly don't want more new drugs if all the poor people around the world are going to have no access to them!" John responds with "Really? If some can't get the new miracle drugs, no one should?" Interesting question, tough issue. You are invited (as I was) to discuss these issues on ABCNews' online community site (and you were wondering how this ties in with the above... shame on you!) here. You are also invited to email John your opinions here or here. Way to go ABCNews.

"A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?"
-George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), British poet.

The people who lose jobs when their companies go out of business may try to resurface in another company or with their own venture. Right on! I'd like to blog today about those times when a company itself comes back to life.

-Industry Standard's Grok is now Media Unspun and is looking for $50 yearly subscriptions.
-Icebox is back and hoping for micropayment nirvana.
-DEN is back out of the closet and trying to sell their vast library of overpriced crap.

I'm sure that the above list is incomplete and would love to add more companies to the list, if you know of any. Furthermore, are there any examples of companies which came back to life and are succeeding? I can't really think of any. Can you?

"The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before."
-Herman Melville (1819-1891), U.S. author.

Self awareness or boredom? Have you noticed recently how many different personality tests there are? These purport to help you figure out what flavor Sweet Tart you are, what CNN anchor you are, what internal organ you are, what PowerPuff girl you are, what cocktail you are and what Kevin Smith character you are, among many other tests of human denomination.



As I often ask in my blog - can someone help me out with this? What is the fascination with these sorts of tests? Does it make you sleep better at night, or make you feel cool for putting on your business card "cherry brown pancreas bubbles, virgin shirley temple lesbian"??!! Are people more bored these days or are people embarking on mind-bending spiritual quests to discover their true nature?

The folks at JellyVision, who brought you the humbling You Don't Know Jack, have now released Smush - the ultimate game show addiction. It airs nightly on USA. The show's online version is very fun - similar to the on-air game - challenging users to link words with overlapping syllables (i.e. "Christmas' fat guy and a fear of enclosed spaces = Santa Claustrophobia"). Keep on eye on the JellyVision folks, they seem to actually have a clue!

I am not affiliated with this company. In exposing them to my massive readership I am not attempting to change that. Nah. Not I.

"People always told me, be careful what you do, don't go around breakin' young girls' hearts."

This just in - Websurfers don't like pop-up ads! About 73% of people close pop-up ads without paying attention to the. Furthermore, those that wait for the ad to load are likely to reduce their opinion of the advertiser (40%) and the host website (36%). Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In other startling news, 5.5% of people prefer unobtrusive advertising. Hmmmm......

Update: Some banner ads for legitimate companies (including Yahoo!) literally include images of people flipping surfers the bird. Gotta love those disgruntled banner designers. Read the article (courtesy of a loyal Fuzzy Blogic reader who suggests they begin including dick shots, ala Fight Club).

I write many blog entries with lots of sarcasm. I will try to restrain myself this time as I report that the Internet Advertising Bureau has released a new set of standards. Does anyone else think this is remotely funny? Now an ad is considered to be delivered later in the process. This will mean that fewer ads are reported as delivered. Meaning advertisers will get more interruptions for their money. Of course, none of this means that online marketing will improve. None of this means that online marketers are getting a clue.

The titanic has sunk and they're busy strapping lifevests onto pieces of ice.

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

The Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has recently unveiled an all new way of measuring time to the preposterous and utterly incomprehensible extreme of 1 quadrillion cycles of energy transitioning in a single trapped mercury ion per second. We can all breath a sigh of relief that the old methods has been improved upon. What were we spending money on? I mean, come on! Until now we were just monitoring 9 billion cycles per second. People! I am so glad to find this news out and am excited to let you know about it.

Seriously, would someone enlighten me as to the benefits of more accurate time measurement? Does it have something to do with GPS-laser guided missiles tracking Bin Laden? Does it help with communication between earth and our future colonies on Mars? I'd seriously like to know. More importantly, can someone find out for me when I can get one of these suckers on my wrist?

This news item reminds me of a really interesting book, 43 pages of which is available on Amazon.com. Check it out - Faster - The Acceleration of Just About Everything, by James Gleick.

Some think of time as a predator, others see it as a friend (inspired by Star Trek: Generations). We spend so much time organizing and worrying about time that its hard to simply live our lives. There's seldom time to live, only time to work. But if we don't work, how can we live. Ah, good question, grasshopper. I think that's why the Internet in general, and blogs in specific, are so great. It doesn't matter what you do, you can still express yourself simply, quickly and efficiently. Blogging, I think, is as much about the author as it is about the reader. The medium is the what?

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

(both quotes are from Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD))

Further thoughts on advertising - Remember how cool/weird/questionable it was when the following first happened:
-including competitors' keywords in META tags
-buying competitors' names as keyword buys in search engines
-bidding on search results to artificially increase placement
-getting text ads on Google
-getting text ads everywhere ("they're so cheap, they must work!")

There is a new player now in the attempted advertising intelligence market : RichLinks. Haven't heard of RichLinks? Well, check out almost any story at InfoWorld. You'll see certain words in the article hyperlinked to pop-up windows, which include advertisements related to that keyword. Now "targeted intelligent" ads are INSIDE news articles. Hmmmm, what's the next step? "Cigarettes Improve Health in next month's Philip Morris' New England Journal of Medicine."

According to RichLink, "Automated content enrichment (ACE) makes content in context scalable and cost-effective. Advanced approaches to content enrichment, such as RichLink, automatically embed Knowledge Bursts directly in the document, allowing multiple pieces of content to be tied to a single term." I don't know about you, but I feel better now!

By they way- for an interesting (i.e. negative) take on textads, check out this article: Microwhoring (courtesy of a friend).