This morning Danah Boyd published an interesting enquiry into online clickthrough advertising: Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean? on her blog, apophenia. The crux of the question stems from the fact that most “savvy” internet users routinely deny ever clicking on ads, and not just loosely-targeted banner ads but contextual text ads as well. The difficult paradox, then, may be that the population of “clickers” may be composed of groups that are well outside the target audience of the advertising, which would call the whole model into question. The most important fact in the piece, though, has to do with the question that there isn’t much data available to test any hypothesis in this area.
Archives for December 2007
6A’s LiveJournal Sold!
John Battelle is reporting on his Searchblog that SixApart has sold LiveJournal to SUP, with whom they had entered into a partnership/localization agreement just over a year ago. I don’t know the details, but it makes sense for 6A to have cut LiveJournal loose – the journalling/social networking product doesn’t really fit into their blog-centric and increasingly enterprise-oriented strategy.
Here’s the press release from Six Apart.
“Friending” and human beings
There’s an interesting article in the NYTimes today about the concept of “friends” and social networks: Friending, Ancient or Otherwise. The suggestion in the article is that one of the reasons humans respond so well to online social networks is that they tap into ancient communication and community-forming patterns. I have been writing the same thing about older-style online community for years now (which reminds me, I should collect some of that writing and post it here).
Beacon and Privacy
Dare Obasanjo digs into the new advertising platform launched by Facebook: Facebook Beacon is Unfixable. I have enjoyed Facebook a great deal, but this kind of thing is pretty bad.
