A post today on Slashdot got me thinking about advertising. Specifically advertising on the internet, but also advertising in general.

The article linked off the Slashdot post was written by a man named Jim Lynch, a long time writer in technology media both digital and print. Mr. Lynch is apparently annoyed by a new feature in Apple’s just-released Safari 5 web browser called Reader. Reader is a feature that, when selected by the user, attempts to detect “article” content on a web page and display it in a simple format which is larger and often easier to read than the normal web site layout. It also attempts to detect multi-page articles and automatically display further pages as you scroll down, effectively creating a “print” view for sites which may lack such things.

What bothers Mr. Lynch basically comes down to advertising. When using Reader, if it works properly all ads are stripped out of the content. More importantly for some, the automatic loading of the next page means cost-per-impression ads get many less views as they would only show on the first page before the user clicked the Reader button.

I understand the key point behind his complaint, web sites cost money to run and that has to come from somewhere. This site costs me about $275 a year between domain registration and server space, and it’s fairly low volume (understatement of the century, I average less than 40 pageviews a day not counting spiders). I pay this out of pocket, since for my use the domain is for my email and the VPS is just a place for me to experiment. As far as I’m concerned I’d be paying for them both anyways, so why not put something there? Obviously that reasoning doesn’t tend to apply outside the range of personal blogs and the costs are much higher when you start talking real traffic levels requiring real servers rather than a virtual slice of one.

Unfortunately, I can’t help but not feel the slightest bit of sorrow for advertisers and those running advertising when they complain about their ads being blocked. They’ve for the most part brought this on themselves, by designing their ads to be as intrusive and annoying as possible. Web publishers have been just as badly a part of the problem, injecting ads as if they were content, allowing nuisance ads with autoplay audio/video or various popup/under/over windows, and in some particularly annoying cases using the content as the ad with IntelliTXT and the like.

We’ve already seen what the ability to skip ads has done to the television industry. For years they thrived on annoyingly loud and repetitive ads which seemed to rely on the “any publicity is good publicity” theory. As soon as the DVR became common the ad market pretty much fell apart on anything people weren’t watching live. Now that extensions like Adblock for Firefox and Apple’s new Reader are making it easy for the average user to dodge ads (rather than us geeks who have been doing it for years) the internet ad community fears the same thing happening.

All I have to say is that the internet ad industry needs to learn from the successful television ad campaigns.

First and foremost, DO NOT PISS OFF YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMER!!!!!!!!!
If an overly loud and annoying ad comes on the radio or TV, I’ll turn the volume down or change the channel if I don’t really care for what’s on while making a mental note to avoid the advertiser if possible. The same applies to internet ads. If your ad stretches over the content I’m trying to read, starts playing audio out of nowhere, makes half the words on the page pop up product links, or otherwise interferes with my reading of the content I will go out of my way to avoid your product where possible. If ad blocking is available, I’ll turn it on immediately when any of those happen and may make a note to avoid the site where it was seen as well.

Second, draw my eye the right way. You do not have to be loud, either literally with audio or figuratively with bright/flashing colors. Use your space to make me interested in what you have, then if I actively click on it you can load your content of choice. This is more for advertiser rather than publishers, but due to point one publishers would do well to enforce point two.

Third, be relevant. If I’m reading a site about cars, an ad for purse built to carry small dogs is most likely irrelevant. Again this is for both publishers and advertisers. Ad networks which do not target based on content are outdated and should be dropped immediately from both sides.

Fourth, don’t try to shove too many ads in my face. I myself start getting annoyed when there’s more than 3–5 ads on the screen at one time, depending on the amount of content and such. Sites that split articles in to a huge number of short pages in order to increase impressions for ad purposes fall in to the same category (and I believe these sites are the greatest reason for the Reader feature). Dividing articles in to multiple pages is fine, but don’t do it unless you have at least as much information on a page as an average magazine. Two paragraphs and a few pictures are not a page.

The short version is provide ads that don’t annoy the reader and preferably are something they might actually want and you won’t have as many blocking them. If the relevance goes up, more people will click on them too. As for the rest, those who have already decided to install full ad blockers, those are gone already. You won’t get them back, it’s just too nice. Download Firefox, install Adblock Plus, and subscribe to one of the popular filter lists like Easylist. Now turn it off and browse to a few popular news sites. Turn it back on and reload those pages. If you don’t agree that this is a much cleaner and more enjoyable way to browse the internet you’re blind.

To whom it may concern:

Over the past two days there has been a lot of talk about your new data plans, particularly the removal of the “unlimited” option. While I believe there should be a third tier for the heavier users, I can understand the reasons for moving to an entirely metered structure and do not have any problems with that part. Where I do have a problem is the additional $20 per month charge for users of internet tethering.

Before I make my points, let me quote one of your Senior Vice Presidents, Mark Collins, from his interview with GigaOm on the day the new plans were announced.

That capability is enabling something you can’t do today. You can use one device and get multiple connections so it’s more useful to you. You’re going to use more data so the price is based on the value that will be delivered.

This is in response to the question “What about the $20 tethering fee? It looks like a convenience charge.”

That capability is only enabling something you can’t do today because you locked it out in the first place. My AT&T-branded LG CU500 could not tether until I had a tethering plan, but my unlocked and unbranded Sony K850i could just fine without any special tethering plans. The Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS both have supported tethering officially since the release of the 3.0 firmware released nearly a year ago, but this was disabled on models sold in the US because you did not want to allow it. Tethering is not some special feature you are doing work to enable and deserve to be paid extra for, it’s a feature all of our data-capable phones have built in which you have actively engaged in defeating.

I won’t argue the statement that it makes my phone and data plan more useful, but again this is a feature that both have inherently had from the beginning and you have actively sought to remove. If I went to rent a four door sedan and found that the passenger side and rear seats had been removed unless I paid an extra fee to have them reinstalled, I and any other reasonable person would think that is outrageous. Unfortunately you are able to take advantage of the fact that 99% of your users are not technology-savvy and thus do not know how much they’re being screwed.

The last part of that response is the most illogical of them all. “You’re going to use more data,” so the price increases without the amount of data I’m allowed to use changing in the slightest? How is me using 2GB in one month on a smartphone different from using 2GB in one month tethering to even a dozen laptops? Data is data, one type doesn’t put any extra load on your network versus another.

Extra charges for tethering were acceptable when the alternative options were smartphone/dumbphone-only unlimited packages, since yes, a tethering user is likely to use more data overall. However, if I’m already buying a bucket of bits how does it matter at all if I choose to use those to feed my smartphone directly or download something to my laptop?

To close, I have been a customer of AT&T since porting in from T-Mobile’s then terrible coverage in 2005. In that time I have at peak carried two voice lines, one iPhone data, and one LaptopConnect at the same time. I know that does not make me anything special, but I’m sure it’s more than most of your single non-business or family customers. I have also defended AT&T as having the best network for geeks due to your use of open GSM technology and until recently highest mobile data speeds. As you might guess, I will not be doing this any longer and I will be emphasizing the problems I have with your change to anyone who may ask about your service. I had been eyeing the Sprint/HTC Evo 4G for a time while debating making the switch, I thank you for helping me make my decision. You can expect to see my number port out in the near future.

Sincerely,
Sean Harlow

Sent via e-mail to Randall Stephenson, CEO and Mark Collins, VP of Voice and Data

Just some of my favorites from the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day group on Facebook.

South Park Mohammed

Dreamworks Mohammed

Rage Cartoons style Mohammed

If the Quran tells Muslims not to depict their prophet, that’s fine and I have no problem with them living by that. When they try to enforce their beliefs on others is where the line is crossed.

Via Pharyngula

If you are seeing this post, your DNS servers have updated and noticed that my old VPS on JaguarPC is no longer where they should look. My blog and other random shit has now been moved over to Linode, where they don’t block IRC and other things I run on my box.

Evolution

A quick primer to send to any creationists you may know.

Edit: Apparently the Youtube WordPress auto-post thing neglects to set the title.

This morning I rebooted my test box running VMware ESXi 3.5 to complete the upgrade from Update 3 to Update 4. The hypervisor came back up, but no guests were running and when I popped open the VI Client it indicated that there were no datastores configured and it could not find any of the virtual machines I had in inventory. It saw the internal disks and that they were formatted VMFS, but would not allow me to do anything other than format them over again.

Normally this would have simply annoyed me since I would have lost my test VMs, but they don’t take long to build so I’d have just formatted them and gone on with my day. Unfortunately within the last week we had temporarily moved a critical application’s VM to this box and we had not properly reconfigured backup. I could restore from the week old backup, but there would be hell to pay.

Since the VMFS partitions were clearly visible I felt I had a chance, but I’m still new to ESX/ESXi so my first step was to flip over to my always running irssi session (if you use IRC and do not use screened irssi, go Google it now and enjoy) and ask for help in #shsc and #vmware. #shsc always has a few guys who work on large VMware installs idling, and of course #vmware is obvious. While waiting for any input from IRC, I went to Google for my next step. I knew ESXi has the capability to be accessed via SSH, but it’s disabled by default, so I looked up how to turn it on. A few minutes later after bringing a monitor over to the machine and rebooting it I had SSH access and could go through system logs from the comfort of my laptop.

In /var/log/messages I found two entries referencing my SATA controller which looked interesting:
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.406 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba000:0:0:3 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.408 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba0:0:0:1 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.

This information, after a quick trip to Google, led to VMware’s SAN configuration guide which references similar issues occurring on SANs, so I tried enabling the resignaturing option and magically my datastores reappeared. After renaming them back to their original names and turning the resignaturing option back off I had all my data and was able to download the disk images and VMX files so I was safe in the event of a major problem.

At this point, I could see my VMs but the VI inventory was still convinced that they were on the “old drives”, so after a bit more time on Google I discovered the Import feature within the datastore browser and I was able to bring the VMs back in and get them booting up.

Screenshot showing my datastores and two VMs running

After confirming that the VMs I really needed were booting and operational, I shut everything down to move the server back to its spot in my rack. Fortunately everything came right back up so the pressure was now off.

Now my concerns shifted. If this happened once, what’s to stop it from happening again? I needed to figure out why it happened. Fortunately at nearly the exact moment I started thinking about this IRC came through for me. “jidar” in #shsc linked to this thread on VMware’s forum with literally the exact same symptoms. A few posts down was a link to this page which again matched my experience exactly and says that U4 updated a number of SATA drivers including the one for the ICH9 controller in my PowerEdge and changed the way they appear to the hypervisor, which led to it not recognizing the drives for what they are.

Right now I’m moderately annoyed at an update that’s not even enough to earn it a minor version number bump on a piece of software intended for enterprise use having a change with the potential to cause this, but on the other hand I don’t expect anyone who really cares about reliability to be using SATA local storage. Ah well, I learned a bit about navigating around ESXi’s internals.

According to CNET, Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins fame) went in front of Congress to argue against the exemption that allows terrestrial radio broadcasters to only pay songwriters and publishers, but not artists, for the right to play their music. Satellite and internet broadcasters by comparison must pay all three.

I’m 100% in favor of making things even between the three radio mediums, as it’s absurd that terrestrial broadcast radio is treated as something special, but I think it should go in the other direction. Rather than raising the rates paid by terrestrial broadcasters to equal those paid by satellite and internet broadcast, I believe the latter two should have their rates lowered to match terrestrial. Some stations are simulcast on all three (Clear Channel has a partnership with XM satellite radio and is also pushing their internet streaming heavily now with their “iheartradio” iPhone app) with three different rates applying. Wouldn’t it make more sense overall to just have one simple charge based on number of listeners? This charge should be much less than it is now, as the radio is second only to word of mouth for how people find new bands.

Radio is a dying medium as it is thanks to satellite (which isn’t doing too hot right now either), streaming, and MP3 players. We don’t need to make it worse.

Just a few seconds ago I finally cleared the checkbox in Adium for my ICQ account. It was my longest-lasting instant message service account, having been active since 1998 or so, and I started using multi-service IM clients like Miranda, Trillian, and Adium entirely because I wanted to keep using ICQ even though most of my friends were on AIM instead.

Times have changed of course, as far as I’m aware I have one contact on ICQ and I haven’t used it to talk to him since AIM started to support offline messages. Looking at my Adium chat logs, since December of 2006 I have not sent a single message on ICQ and the only messages I’ve received are spam. With that in mind, it’s time for it to go.

PZ over at Pharyngula linked to this Facebook group, so I had to share. Blasphemy Day International 2009.