Google Upgrades AdSense
An anonymous reader writes "According to a story in the New York Times, Google will now "give advertisers more control over where their ads are shown, how they pay for them and what they look like." Author John Battelle claims "The core philosophy of Google's advertising business is that these ads are actually valuable and useful to users: look for Chevy trucks and get Chevy truck ads. Now we are in another place. It's more about branding and more about advertising other things than what you are looking for, and, cynically, it may be about being a public company that needs revenue growth."" The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
What about ads that most will find offensive?
Search for negroes on Google.com and see what ads show up on the right hand side.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Firefox becomes Lynx!
R.
I can see it now:
Me: Hi Mom, its me. I'm calling because I need you to set up your email to allow me to send you encrypted messages.
Mom: Ooookay. Er, what?
Me: Well, GMail snoops on all our messages to put targeted ads next to our email.
Mom: And?
Me: That's bad. All I need is for you to install this Firefox extension that will rot-13s anything we send.
Mom: So GMail is bad? I didn't know. I think I should just go back to my hotmail account.
Me: No, Mom, hotmail is really bad.
Mom: Well, I'll just stop using email then.
Me: No, Mom, wait...It is just a Firefox extension.
Mom: Right, no more email. Goodbye.
!hoD