Not actually futures

February 22, 2010

Andy Atherton’s recent post in AdExchanger about a futures market for advertising is interesting but flawed, primarily because of problems with the terminology. Let’s start with forward contracts. A forward contract is just a contract for the future sale of something. Guaranteed advertising buys are forward contracts, for example. A forward contract doesn’t imply that [...]

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Your terms of service don’t exist

February 17, 2010

Recently some guy got an inactive Tumblr username, ‘pitchfork’, jerked from him by Tumblr and given to Pitchfork Music. Pitchfork handled the incident with exemplary style. Nothing worth commenting on – until some other guy wrote that this was a non-story, because Tumblr reserved the right to do this in its terms of service. Less [...]

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Just say no to interface cruft

February 10, 2010

Just read this post by Andrew Parker (who, along with his colleague Eric Friedman, has helped me out more times than I can count) about Google Buzz’s location within the GMail interface. Andrew thinks the location in the GMail interface is the thing that’ll make Google Buzz a killer feature, like GChat. I think it’s [...]

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Location-based ads & Apple exclusivity

February 5, 2010

Apple recently published a developer tip that said applications accessing location information primarily for advertising targeting would be rejected – applications had to provide users with ‘beneficial information’. Gizmodo picked up on it, and claimed – referencing a tweet from Craig Hockenberry – that Apple would be keeping location-based advertising for itself, no doubt powered [...]

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Implications of Ghostery acquisition

January 21, 2010

A couple of days ago, the regulatory compliance firm Better Advertising announced that it had acquired the web-bug-tracking Firefox addon Ghostery. It got mentioned in a couple places but was under-discussed, given its potential importance. Ghostery as a Firefox extension is important because it has an opt-in database of web bug usage, collected from its [...]

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