Why aren't they doing it, then? The technical point still stands. If you want to control what people can view, maybe develop your own protocol and don't freeride on HTTP which you didn't pay anything for? Same useless argument.
Right. Strawman, but whatever.
You failed to answer my question, but I'll answer yours - the answer to why they aren't doing it is a) at the moment the number of people blocking ads is not sufficient to be worth the effort b) there's no basic technical way to implement just by looking at the user agent. You can do it with some relatively basic scripting but (for us anyway) it's just not worth the effort to force a couple of malcontents to stop leeching off our service.
You support Slashdot by writing comments, since that's the real content, not some unedited/badly edited regurgitated "news" the monkeys put up.
I support Slashdot by writing comments to articles that I find interesting that are sometimes moderated well and encourage more people to visit the site and participate.
Of those extra people, some small percentage of them might click on ads, increasing revenue. That is why they support valuable contributors by letting them opt out of ads - because it means they're more likely to come back, make useful contributions, and thus drive more ad impressions.
The ads are, generally, for videogame stuff. There are some exceptions - sometimes its tech stuff, sometimes its movies/music, and then on rare occasions we'll have more fringe things like bank offers - but all of these are actually pretty carefully selected by our ad agency to be of interest to males 18-35 with disposable income, which is our user base.
Our ads are relatively unobstrusive - some are animated/flash, but they do not flash or make noise. There are no popups/popunders. They do repeat occasionally. They are generally targeted, and they are NEVER dangerous (I have never gotten a 3rd party malware ad so I don't know where people are going to get this experience)!
I am sure it will end up in the T&Cs of many sites as an explicit term. We've discussed it but just haven't bothered yet (because it's basically unenforceable until ad blocking software makes its presence known).
My point really is that up til now (and probably for the foreseeable future - not enough people really bother to block ads so that it has really damaged the business model, at least as far as I can see), there is this expectation on the part of publishers that making content available + ads on page == monetised site. They are (rightly or wrongly) assuming that the user/reader/consumer is holding up their end of this "unwritten deal" and absorbing in some small way the ads on their pages.
When it becomes apparent that this isn't the case (...if that ever happens, which again, I think is probably unlikely) I suspect publishers will take a more aggressive attitude - including uselessly making it part of their T&Cs that "user agrees to not attempt to circumvent ad displaying software"... etc.
I have been trying hard to get our site some sort of "donationware" setup so people can opt out by throwing a few bucks our way, but it is tricky and time consuming and finding the right point is tough if you don't have much else to offer. So for now it is ads and hoping people can deal with the minor inconvenience.
There are alternatives. I laid out in some detail in my previous post what an alternative might look like.
I must have missed that. Your alternative seems to be some combination of: get rid of ads, abolish data centres, use BitTorrent, get government to fix it, democratise everything.
Oh, and instead of solve problems of bandwidth by caching and clever software, upgrade the international links coming into Australia. I can't remember why we didn't think of doing that at the time, but we probably had a good reason.
And in case you wonder - Nope, I don't feel "bad" about this. If Slashdot vanished tomorrow, another "news for nerds" site would take its place overnight.
Extrapolate then what would happen from some possible outcomes:
1) All us Slashdot readers stop spending time reading news for nerds altogether. Nothing changes.
2) All us Slashdot readers move to reddit or HN or some new site.
If 2) happens, it is almost inevitable that in order to deal with the influx of new users, they will need to expand their service in a way that costs them money. Someone, somewhere, will need to pay for that.
I have asked this question elsewhere, but I'm curious to know from hardcore ad blockers - how would you feel if your ad blocking software reported to sites that it was in place (via user-agent or whatever) and then sites had the ability to selectively allow or disallow you access?
You are missing my point, I think. They are also paying for the bytes that stream to you. You are not bearing all the cost of receiving those bytes.
You might download a web page which has 1MB of content - mostly HTML and images, and then (say) 10% of that might be ad-related stuff.
You pay your ISP for the ability to do that. They are paying their service provider for the ability to send it to you. That 10% is what subsidises them being able to send you the other 90%.
If they didn't have ads, they could just as easily say YOU are parasitic scum, because YOU are wasting their bandwidth and costing them money (note: I seem to recall reading here on Slashdot that some US ISPs do actually say this about their customers because they cost them more using services like Hulu).
In short, it is a two way street. The risk of blocking ads is more sites moving to paywall models. Noone has figured out a good micropayment system and most people don't want to pay to access sites anyway. Unfortunately generally you can't have it both ways.
When you put your server up on the public Internet, I'm free to download any file off of it I like
Yep. But there are some limits to this in the "unwritten social contract" that exists between people that provide web servers, and people that consume them.
For example, are you free to download any file you like 10,000,000,000 times? Technically you are "free" to do that. Unless the site has some sort of system in place to stop you doing it, you probably could get away with it, and the site wouldn't find out until you'd consumed a lot of bandwidth and probably cost them a lot of money.
But that doesn't mean it's not a douchebag thing to do. The expectation is that when you put up a free public service, the majority of people are not going to abuse that service by overly consuming its resources and blocking the ads that keep it online.
You can say "well, fuck those people, they should have a system in place to stop abusive uses". Maybe. If I leave my front door open and people come in and help themselves to my stuff, I should have locked the door - but those people are still douchebags.
Here's a question I asked someone else: if ad blocking software reported to websites that it was in effect, how would you feel if websites then had the power to selectively allow or disallow you access - to the whole site, or parts of it?
What is silly for you to do is to blame *the way the Internet works* for your web business not working out.
Shrug, our business is working out, and has been for 10 years. Fortunately the vast majority of people don't block ads. I try to reason with the ones that do, to try to convince them that they get more value out of this free service - by just sacrificing a tiny amount - than they would if a) we didn't exist or b) they had to pay us directly. I like providing services for free and having other people pay for them.
There's a weird attitude of self-entitlement that many people seem to have about ads. I don't understand it. I know I wouldn't pay for Slashdot, as much as I love coming here and reading the discussions. Slashdot even present me with the option to hide ads based on my "contributions", and I opt not to do that, because I like supporting them explicitly through viewing their ads and sometimes even clicking on them - because sometimes the ads are relevant to me and my work.
Otherwise, I feel ZERO shame in blocking your ads, and using the shared open protocol to request the information you make available.
So then here's a question: how would you feel about your ad blocker making it known to sites that you are blocking ads, and then us having the ability to selectively allow or deny you access to our site (or parts of it) on that basis?
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use.
Forgot to add this in my other post, but you might be interested in Flattr, a product from one of the PirateBay guys. I've seen it pop up in a few places.
The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data
BitTorrent is a actually a terrible way to distribute data. It works because it decentralises the COST of the data distribution - instead of a data centre or website absorbing it, it is (largely) democratised amongst all the peers who absorb the cost by paying their ISP.
From a network model is sort of sucks, because you 10 people on the same ISP downloading the same file will all download 10 copies of the the file from a variety of different sources.
Your next point about distributing content:
I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
.... is exactly what ISPs have been doing for years with things like their local mirrors of Linux distributions. That way the ISP saves money - because those 10 copies of the same file is reduced to downloading one copy. BitTorrent won't really offer this, unless the ISP is seeding random torrents all over the place.
But you end up needing MORE data centres, because you have to have infrastructure at every point to cache this data as close to a large volume of end users.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So 10 years ago we started a website to provide fast local downloads of gaming files to Australians. We are a long way away from everyone else, and 10+ years ago we were even further away. Having a few thousand Australians trying to pull large gaming files over the Pacific was causing a lot of grief. ISPs weren't really keen to pay for that stuff at the time, so we were able to do it, fortunately sponsored so we could absorb the (ludicrous) costs.
Eventually our sponsorship dried up and we resorted to ads. The ads meant we could continue providing the service FOR FREE, without having to ask users for any money. All they had to do was spend a few nanoseconds of consciousness absorbing ad information and we could go on providing this invaluable service for Aussies who wanted the latest gaming files, quickly and reliably.
Advertising provides a model for things like this to actually exist. The only alternative is to actually take money from the users to pay for it. Ads keep websites free.
A wireless global IP network ? I am not sure if you play video games, but all the guys I know, including myself, shudder at the thought of using such a network for gaming.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it...
I've made this point elsewhere in this thread, but there are two parties paying for bandwidth when you go to a website. You're paying for your end, and they're paying for their end. They're not "freeloading on your Internet connection" any more than you are freeloading on theirs. The difference is they're doing it in good faith that in return for connecting you to their content (which they not only pay the bandwidth for, but the server time to service your request, the costs of having a human being put it online, and all the overhead of running the business that allows it all to happen), you will spend a fraction of time absorbing the ad that they're putting in front of you.
I will not feel guilted into using my bandwidth to download a single byte I'm not interested in downloading. If I'm stealing, am I also stealing when I use a text mode browser like lynx? Are blind people that use text browsers and a screen reader stealing?
I responded to another post elsewhere with this same comment - I think it's important to remember that you are not the only party paying for bandwidth when you are browsing someone's website. They are also paying for that bandwidth (and the server capacity to service the request, and of course all the other stuff that got the content there in the first place).
Their model (disclaimer: we run a website that makes revenue by advertising) is not so much about you stealing their stuff when you block ads. It's like bending the unwritten Terms and Conditions that say "hey, we'll make this info available, and pay to publish it, and then pay half the costs of delivering it to you, if you'll pay the other half of the delivery costs with your bandwidth, and then help us cover the rest of the costs by letting us rent your eyeballs to our ad partners".
There are still tangible benefits that they (and we) get by having your consume the information - it's a single digit increment to the user base that can be used to demonstrate reach. However, the lack of a delivery of an ad impression does impact the bottom line in some cases.
I would strongly encourage you to find the content you want elsewhere rather than come to our site and block ads. We make a lot of stuff available (game demos, trailers, patches, etc) that you can find somewhere else. We try to make it easy and painless and above all fast to download files, and it costs us a lot to provide that service. If you're not going to lend us your eyeballs as part of the transaction, then I'd rather you visited one of our competitors (who I feel will generally have more obnoxious ads and slower downloads!) and take advantage of their services.
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
I am in front of the Internet browsing all day, every day. I have never had this problem, ever. I do not run adblock, or noscript, or anything.
We run a website and advertising is currently its sole method of generating revenue. Our ad serving networks (Google, or our agency here in Australia) are highly reliable and we have never had that experience on our site, in over 10 years of serving ads.
I am not sure what sites you are visiting where this is a regular occurrence (unless its Demonoid in the last couple weeks:) but rather than block all ads on all sites everywhere because of this, I'd recommend you just STOP going to them and instead find other sites that use ad networks of higher repute.
We run a website about video games. 100% of our revenue comes from online advertising. From our statistics when using Google AdWords, somewhere between 1-3% of users on a typical day will click on an ad.
Just like spam, there is a tiny percentage of people that do see some value in whatever is put in front of their face. There's this overwhelming trend on Slashdot that goes "well, I've never clicked on an ad, therefore, noone else has". People click on ads. People buy products based on ad clicks. This is how Google make money. This is how Google's ad customers sell products.
Just because you don't click on an ad - IMHO - doesn't mean you should just block all ads for ever. Small sites like us that work really hard to provide useful content and services that depend on advertising depend on these ad delivery numbers to drive ad sales and generate revenue.
Why haven't we got a system where people can pay to opt out? Well, we're working on that. But I want to keep the website free. I think the tradeoff - a few hundred milliseconds of page load time, a few hundred KB of bandwidth, plus maybe the tiniest percentage of your attention possible (maybe even zero) means we can continue to deliver stuff to you and other users, for free.
So why don't you just not go to those sites that are slow and irritating and have misleading images? It's not like there's a dearth of websites online for every topic imaginable.
We run a website about video games. For more than 10 years it has JUST generated enough revenue to employ the staff that manage it. All the revenue comes from advertising. It is primarily a hobby for us.
People who wantonly block ads on every site do damage to our site, where we do whatever we can to keep the ads unobtrusive and related to our content (so we deal with a lot of video game publishers, tech sites, etc). We don't have popups, we try to avoid obnoxious dancing monkeys, etc.
But every person who just installs a generic ad blocker and then comes to our site is another set of eyeballs that don't get delivered an ad, and it literally means we don't make money.
If people don't like our site, they can go elsewhere to one of the myriad other gaming sites out there. However, we provide a generally pretty clean download experience for the latest trailers, patches, demos, clients, etc. It costs us a fortune (...comparatively, because we're hosted in Australia) to deliver a 4GB game download to thousands of users around the planet. All we're asking for is a few seconds of your consciousness - and yes, maybe a few hundred milliseconds of loadtime and a couple extra KB in transfer - in return so we can make deals with advertisers and continue to fund and grow our business.
Rather than block ads, I'd rather people simply stopped coming to our site and went elsewhere to use their services.
But you understand that the site you're visiting also pays for the bandwidth to deliver you the content, right? So,, uh,, how dare you block ads and deny them the revenue they might need to send you the content you so richly deserve.
A lot of people complain about reading being hard on LCD screens but I've been doing it for years and have no problems with it.
At first I read on an HP iPaq bought specifically for reading, but then once I got an Android phone I switched to that.
I read WAY more because I have my books with me at all times. Standing in a long line somewhere? Bust out the phone and read.
I also have a Kobo ebook reader which is great as well, but I find I end up reading on my phone still a lot.
The big problem is finding DRM-free ebooks for these platforms. The temptation to get a Kindle and buy into its ecosystem is huge, but I don't want to deal with that.
Speaking just for myself, I'm skipping both StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, because of the onerous DRM and always-online requirements Blizzard now uses.
Just to provide a different viewpoint (not that I have any problem whatsoever with you doing that), I play StarCraft 2 exclusively online in multiplayer mode.
I tried the single player game and got an hour or two into it before getting bored. I haven't really enjoyed single player games for many years; I prefer the competitive (or co-operative) aspects of multiplayer games.
With online multiplayer games, "always on DRM" has never really been a big deal for me - though I certainly have avoided buying games from Ubisoft and other publishers because of their onerous DRM requirements, even though the games have interested me (e.g., the recent From Dust, which looks as close to Populous as anything has for many years).
So I totally understand your perspective, but just wanted to chime in and say that - for me at least, and I assume a few others like me - single player offline is not a feature we want any more.
I have the "downloadable app" (assuming it is just called "Google Voice Search"). It is a basic front end that gives you the ability to do some voice commands - IF your device is set to US English (I'm in Australia but I have my phone set to US English so I have access to these extra commands).
Some of the commands you can do are:
"set alarm for 8.30pm" "note to self" "send email to" "navigate to"...but it doesn't - as far as I can see - equal the advanced functionality that has been made available in Jelly Bean, in which you can do more Siri-like actions like say "what is the weather in San Francisco?" and have it read you back an answer.
I agree re: the point about upgrading, but I can't think of any other justification for why this application isn't available on pre-4.1 phones. I am conscious that Google are struggling from more of an image problem - especially amongst developers - because of the Android fragmentation issue and moving people onto more advanced phones (especially their own hardware, like the Nexus series) will help drag that sub-1% install base on the latest version or whatever it is into a more reasonable figure that is competitive with Apple.
I find it weird that these advanced voice services aren't available pre-Jelly Bean. I wouldn't have thought it was a technical limitation - aren't all the voice commands just fired off into some cloudy thing anyway?
I can imagine they want to give people incentive to upgrade to a new phone, but Apple tried that with Siri and seemed to get routinely bashed for it. I haven't seen too many people (other than me:) bitching about it for Android though...
You get an overview of ALL stuff from ALL feeds, or just from invididual categories/feeds you selected (which acts recursively, which is awesome).
I am not sure if I am reading this right, but - can't you do this in Google Reader?
I can look at "All items", which is a view of every item from all my feeds. Or I can drill down to a category (e.g., 'Games', which is all my RSS feeds relating to video games). From there I can drill down to an individual feed (e.g., Blue's News) and read the items in that feed.
I used to use an app but I would find it very hard to go back to a non-Internet-based solution. Not sure if RSSOwl does it, but the fact that I can log into any of my PCs (or my phone) and have my feed reading exactly where l left it off last time is invaluable.
Yeh, probably my big issue would be that videos uploaded should go to a region that is NOT the one that you are in, so that law enforcement in that country/state can not just arbitrarily have your video removed.
As I understand it there are still a few states in the US where recording the police is still a bit iffy? But if those videos where uploaded to somewhere like the Netherlands, you would have a higher level of confidence that they'd stay online.
I keep Qik video on my phone for this reason. It's an Android app that is developed by (or owned by?) the Skype guys. Videos are "instantly" uploaded online, although there's presumably a small time gap during which the upload is happening that the phone could be stopped/destroyed/etc.
Google serving ads is different. For anyone seaching for a product they can throw sponsored links at the top of the search results page and they are often relevant to the person searching. This particular advertising mechanism actually makes sense and is probably one of the most effective around. Not that everyone is doing a search where ads are welcome, but that nobody goes looking for products or services on Facebook ads there are never relevant to what people are doing. I suspect FB click-through rate is much lower than Googles. OTOH, FB ads have images and reflect your "likes" even if they are not related to what you're doing at the moment. I suppose the jury is still out on this.
That is true of the search network - but not so much the display network, which Google also aggressively push.
We are running a campaign for our software/web development company as an experiment at the moment. After reviewing the data I was surprised to see we only had a handful of clicks coming through from the 'Search' part of it - the vast majority came from the Display Network (i.e, sites/blogs/etc running Google AdSense to make money). In our first few days it was about a 70:3 ratio.
We decided to run it like that for 2 weeks and then turn off Display and see how it goes (this happened yesterday so no real data yet).
When I started looking for what people thought was the best strategy, I found (as you might expect) a lot of mixed opinions. I did find a Google whitepaper that suggested that using the Display network will result in a better net result, but I haven't read it closely yet.
We - like I imagine most businesses - are not just interested in clicks, we're interested in 'leads'. My data is obviously from a very small period of running ads, but so far it seems that the bulk of the traffic coming from the Display network is "unqualified" and will have a lower overall "yield" when compared to the Search traffic - people actively seeking stuff.
It is pretty interesting stuff to play with though, especially for me - I have no marketing/sales background; I know a lot of this stuff is old hat to people that have been doing it for a while but it's fascinating to see the differences in how people click and what they do in this sort of way.
Courtesy of my Dad and my uncles, I grew up with hundreds of Phantom comics around me. I probably started reading them around 5-6 and I still read them to this day.
The Phantom is a Batman-esque "superhero" in the sense that he is a mere human - no superpowers - who is out to stop crime. There are hundreds of different stories, many of them are suitable for children - violence is usually limited to the occasional punch in the face, and gunplay is almost always non-fatal (one of his skills is being able to shoot the guns out of the hands of criminals, so the worst thing you can really say about it is it gives a massively inaccurate portrayal of how easy it is to hit targets:)
I suspect it's probably hard to find in the US, but if you go to a comic store and look for the old copies you'll probably find a few. There are also annual releases and regular reprints of the great old copies you can pick up for a few bucks.
I don't think it is very big outside of Australia and parts of Scandinavia, but it's a great read that I think is awesome for kids to get into - they're fun, they generally have good themes of good triumphing over evil, and I think they'll encourage reading more than trying to dump books in their laps.
Slashdot Mirror
Why aren't they doing it, then? The technical point still stands. If you want to control what people can view, maybe develop your own protocol and don't freeride on HTTP which you didn't pay anything for? Same useless argument.
Right. Strawman, but whatever.
You failed to answer my question, but I'll answer yours - the answer to why they aren't doing it is a) at the moment the number of people blocking ads is not sufficient to be worth the effort b) there's no basic technical way to implement just by looking at the user agent. You can do it with some relatively basic scripting but (for us anyway) it's just not worth the effort to force a couple of malcontents to stop leeching off our service.
You support Slashdot by writing comments, since that's the real content, not some unedited/badly edited regurgitated "news" the monkeys put up.
I support Slashdot by writing comments to articles that I find interesting that are sometimes moderated well and encourage more people to visit the site and participate.
Of those extra people, some small percentage of them might click on ads, increasing revenue. That is why they support valuable contributors by letting them opt out of ads - because it means they're more likely to come back, make useful contributions, and thus drive more ad impressions.
The ads are, generally, for videogame stuff. There are some exceptions - sometimes its tech stuff, sometimes its movies/music, and then on rare occasions we'll have more fringe things like bank offers - but all of these are actually pretty carefully selected by our ad agency to be of interest to males 18-35 with disposable income, which is our user base.
Our ads are relatively unobstrusive - some are animated/flash, but they do not flash or make noise. There are no popups/popunders. They do repeat occasionally. They are generally targeted, and they are NEVER dangerous (I have never gotten a 3rd party malware ad so I don't know where people are going to get this experience)!
I am sure it will end up in the T&Cs of many sites as an explicit term. We've discussed it but just haven't bothered yet (because it's basically unenforceable until ad blocking software makes its presence known).
My point really is that up til now (and probably for the foreseeable future - not enough people really bother to block ads so that it has really damaged the business model, at least as far as I can see), there is this expectation on the part of publishers that making content available + ads on page == monetised site. They are (rightly or wrongly) assuming that the user/reader/consumer is holding up their end of this "unwritten deal" and absorbing in some small way the ads on their pages.
When it becomes apparent that this isn't the case (...if that ever happens, which again, I think is probably unlikely) I suspect publishers will take a more aggressive attitude - including uselessly making it part of their T&Cs that "user agrees to not attempt to circumvent ad displaying software"... etc.
I have been trying hard to get our site some sort of "donationware" setup so people can opt out by throwing a few bucks our way, but it is tricky and time consuming and finding the right point is tough if you don't have much else to offer. So for now it is ads and hoping people can deal with the minor inconvenience.
There are alternatives. I laid out in some detail in my previous post what an alternative might look like.
I must have missed that. Your alternative seems to be some combination of: get rid of ads, abolish data centres, use BitTorrent, get government to fix it, democratise everything.
Oh, and instead of solve problems of bandwidth by caching and clever software, upgrade the international links coming into Australia. I can't remember why we didn't think of doing that at the time, but we probably had a good reason.
And in case you wonder - Nope, I don't feel "bad" about this. If Slashdot vanished tomorrow, another "news for nerds" site would take its place overnight.
Extrapolate then what would happen from some possible outcomes:
1) All us Slashdot readers stop spending time reading news for nerds altogether. Nothing changes.
2) All us Slashdot readers move to reddit or HN or some new site.
If 2) happens, it is almost inevitable that in order to deal with the influx of new users, they will need to expand their service in a way that costs them money. Someone, somewhere, will need to pay for that.
I have asked this question elsewhere, but I'm curious to know from hardcore ad blockers - how would you feel if your ad blocking software reported to sites that it was in place (via user-agent or whatever) and then sites had the ability to selectively allow or disallow you access?
You are missing my point, I think. They are also paying for the bytes that stream to you. You are not bearing all the cost of receiving those bytes.
You might download a web page which has 1MB of content - mostly HTML and images, and then (say) 10% of that might be ad-related stuff.
You pay your ISP for the ability to do that. They are paying their service provider for the ability to send it to you. That 10% is what subsidises them being able to send you the other 90%.
If they didn't have ads, they could just as easily say YOU are parasitic scum, because YOU are wasting their bandwidth and costing them money (note: I seem to recall reading here on Slashdot that some US ISPs do actually say this about their customers because they cost them more using services like Hulu).
In short, it is a two way street. The risk of blocking ads is more sites moving to paywall models. Noone has figured out a good micropayment system and most people don't want to pay to access sites anyway. Unfortunately generally you can't have it both ways.
When you put your server up on the public Internet, I'm free to download any file off of it I like
Yep. But there are some limits to this in the "unwritten social contract" that exists between people that provide web servers, and people that consume them.
For example, are you free to download any file you like 10,000,000,000 times? Technically you are "free" to do that. Unless the site has some sort of system in place to stop you doing it, you probably could get away with it, and the site wouldn't find out until you'd consumed a lot of bandwidth and probably cost them a lot of money.
But that doesn't mean it's not a douchebag thing to do. The expectation is that when you put up a free public service, the majority of people are not going to abuse that service by overly consuming its resources and blocking the ads that keep it online.
You can say "well, fuck those people, they should have a system in place to stop abusive uses". Maybe. If I leave my front door open and people come in and help themselves to my stuff, I should have locked the door - but those people are still douchebags.
Here's a question I asked someone else: if ad blocking software reported to websites that it was in effect, how would you feel if websites then had the power to selectively allow or disallow you access - to the whole site, or parts of it?
What is silly for you to do is to blame *the way the Internet works* for your web business not working out.
Shrug, our business is working out, and has been for 10 years. Fortunately the vast majority of people don't block ads. I try to reason with the ones that do, to try to convince them that they get more value out of this free service - by just sacrificing a tiny amount - than they would if a) we didn't exist or b) they had to pay us directly. I like providing services for free and having other people pay for them.
There's a weird attitude of self-entitlement that many people seem to have about ads. I don't understand it. I know I wouldn't pay for Slashdot, as much as I love coming here and reading the discussions. Slashdot even present me with the option to hide ads based on my "contributions", and I opt not to do that, because I like supporting them explicitly through viewing their ads and sometimes even clicking on them - because sometimes the ads are relevant to me and my work.
Otherwise, I feel ZERO shame in blocking your ads, and using the shared open protocol to request the information you make available.
So then here's a question: how would you feel about your ad blocker making it known to sites that you are blocking ads, and then us having the ability to selectively allow or deny you access to our site (or parts of it) on that basis?
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use.
Forgot to add this in my other post, but you might be interested in Flattr, a product from one of the PirateBay guys. I've seen it pop up in a few places.
The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data
BitTorrent is a actually a terrible way to distribute data. It works because it decentralises the COST of the data distribution - instead of a data centre or website absorbing it, it is (largely) democratised amongst all the peers who absorb the cost by paying their ISP.
From a network model is sort of sucks, because you 10 people on the same ISP downloading the same file will all download 10 copies of the the file from a variety of different sources.
Your next point about distributing content:
I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
.... is exactly what ISPs have been doing for years with things like their local mirrors of Linux distributions. That way the ISP saves money - because those 10 copies of the same file is reduced to downloading one copy. BitTorrent won't really offer this, unless the ISP is seeding random torrents all over the place.
But you end up needing MORE data centres, because you have to have infrastructure at every point to cache this data as close to a large volume of end users.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So 10 years ago we started a website to provide fast local downloads of gaming files to Australians. We are a long way away from everyone else, and 10+ years ago we were even further away. Having a few thousand Australians trying to pull large gaming files over the Pacific was causing a lot of grief. ISPs weren't really keen to pay for that stuff at the time, so we were able to do it, fortunately sponsored so we could absorb the (ludicrous) costs.
Eventually our sponsorship dried up and we resorted to ads. The ads meant we could continue providing the service FOR FREE, without having to ask users for any money. All they had to do was spend a few nanoseconds of consciousness absorbing ad information and we could go on providing this invaluable service for Aussies who wanted the latest gaming files, quickly and reliably.
Advertising provides a model for things like this to actually exist. The only alternative is to actually take money from the users to pay for it. Ads keep websites free.
A wireless global IP network ? I am not sure if you play video games, but all the guys I know, including myself, shudder at the thought of using such a network for gaming.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it...
I've made this point elsewhere in this thread, but there are two parties paying for bandwidth when you go to a website. You're paying for your end, and they're paying for their end. They're not "freeloading on your Internet connection" any more than you are freeloading on theirs. The difference is they're doing it in good faith that in return for connecting you to their content (which they not only pay the bandwidth for, but the server time to service your request, the costs of having a human being put it online, and all the overhead of running the business that allows it all to happen), you will spend a fraction of time absorbing the ad that they're putting in front of you.
I will not feel guilted into using my bandwidth to download a single byte I'm not interested in downloading. If I'm stealing, am I also stealing when I use a text mode browser like lynx? Are blind people that use text browsers and a screen reader stealing?
I responded to another post elsewhere with this same comment - I think it's important to remember that you are not the only party paying for bandwidth when you are browsing someone's website. They are also paying for that bandwidth (and the server capacity to service the request, and of course all the other stuff that got the content there in the first place).
Their model (disclaimer: we run a website that makes revenue by advertising) is not so much about you stealing their stuff when you block ads. It's like bending the unwritten Terms and Conditions that say "hey, we'll make this info available, and pay to publish it, and then pay half the costs of delivering it to you, if you'll pay the other half of the delivery costs with your bandwidth, and then help us cover the rest of the costs by letting us rent your eyeballs to our ad partners".
There are still tangible benefits that they (and we) get by having your consume the information - it's a single digit increment to the user base that can be used to demonstrate reach. However, the lack of a delivery of an ad impression does impact the bottom line in some cases.
I would strongly encourage you to find the content you want elsewhere rather than come to our site and block ads. We make a lot of stuff available (game demos, trailers, patches, etc) that you can find somewhere else. We try to make it easy and painless and above all fast to download files, and it costs us a lot to provide that service. If you're not going to lend us your eyeballs as part of the transaction, then I'd rather you visited one of our competitors (who I feel will generally have more obnoxious ads and slower downloads!) and take advantage of their services.
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
I am in front of the Internet browsing all day, every day. I have never had this problem, ever. I do not run adblock, or noscript, or anything.
We run a website and advertising is currently its sole method of generating revenue. Our ad serving networks (Google, or our agency here in Australia) are highly reliable and we have never had that experience on our site, in over 10 years of serving ads.
I am not sure what sites you are visiting where this is a regular occurrence (unless its Demonoid in the last couple weeks :) but rather than block all ads on all sites everywhere because of this, I'd recommend you just STOP going to them and instead find other sites that use ad networks of higher repute.
We run a website about video games. 100% of our revenue comes from online advertising. From our statistics when using Google AdWords, somewhere between 1-3% of users on a typical day will click on an ad.
Just like spam, there is a tiny percentage of people that do see some value in whatever is put in front of their face. There's this overwhelming trend on Slashdot that goes "well, I've never clicked on an ad, therefore, noone else has". People click on ads. People buy products based on ad clicks. This is how Google make money. This is how Google's ad customers sell products.
Just because you don't click on an ad - IMHO - doesn't mean you should just block all ads for ever. Small sites like us that work really hard to provide useful content and services that depend on advertising depend on these ad delivery numbers to drive ad sales and generate revenue.
Why haven't we got a system where people can pay to opt out? Well, we're working on that. But I want to keep the website free. I think the tradeoff - a few hundred milliseconds of page load time, a few hundred KB of bandwidth, plus maybe the tiniest percentage of your attention possible (maybe even zero) means we can continue to deliver stuff to you and other users, for free.
So why don't you just not go to those sites that are slow and irritating and have misleading images? It's not like there's a dearth of websites online for every topic imaginable.
We run a website about video games. For more than 10 years it has JUST generated enough revenue to employ the staff that manage it. All the revenue comes from advertising. It is primarily a hobby for us.
People who wantonly block ads on every site do damage to our site, where we do whatever we can to keep the ads unobtrusive and related to our content (so we deal with a lot of video game publishers, tech sites, etc). We don't have popups, we try to avoid obnoxious dancing monkeys, etc.
But every person who just installs a generic ad blocker and then comes to our site is another set of eyeballs that don't get delivered an ad, and it literally means we don't make money.
If people don't like our site, they can go elsewhere to one of the myriad other gaming sites out there. However, we provide a generally pretty clean download experience for the latest trailers, patches, demos, clients, etc. It costs us a fortune (...comparatively, because we're hosted in Australia) to deliver a 4GB game download to thousands of users around the planet. All we're asking for is a few seconds of your consciousness - and yes, maybe a few hundred milliseconds of loadtime and a couple extra KB in transfer - in return so we can make deals with advertisers and continue to fund and grow our business.
Rather than block ads, I'd rather people simply stopped coming to our site and went elsewhere to use their services.
But you understand that the site you're visiting also pays for the bandwidth to deliver you the content, right? So,, uh,, how dare you block ads and deny them the revenue they might need to send you the content you so richly deserve.
A lot of people complain about reading being hard on LCD screens but I've been doing it for years and have no problems with it.
At first I read on an HP iPaq bought specifically for reading, but then once I got an Android phone I switched to that.
I read WAY more because I have my books with me at all times. Standing in a long line somewhere? Bust out the phone and read.
I also have a Kobo ebook reader which is great as well, but I find I end up reading on my phone still a lot.
The big problem is finding DRM-free ebooks for these platforms. The temptation to get a Kindle and buy into its ecosystem is huge, but I don't want to deal with that.
Speaking just for myself, I'm skipping both StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, because of the onerous DRM and always-online requirements Blizzard now uses.
Just to provide a different viewpoint (not that I have any problem whatsoever with you doing that), I play StarCraft 2 exclusively online in multiplayer mode.
I tried the single player game and got an hour or two into it before getting bored. I haven't really enjoyed single player games for many years; I prefer the competitive (or co-operative) aspects of multiplayer games.
With online multiplayer games, "always on DRM" has never really been a big deal for me - though I certainly have avoided buying games from Ubisoft and other publishers because of their onerous DRM requirements, even though the games have interested me (e.g., the recent From Dust, which looks as close to Populous as anything has for many years).
So I totally understand your perspective, but just wanted to chime in and say that - for me at least, and I assume a few others like me - single player offline is not a feature we want any more.
I have the "downloadable app" (assuming it is just called "Google Voice Search"). It is a basic front end that gives you the ability to do some voice commands - IF your device is set to US English (I'm in Australia but I have my phone set to US English so I have access to these extra commands).
Some of the commands you can do are:
"set alarm for 8.30pm" ...but it doesn't - as far as I can see - equal the advanced functionality that has been made available in Jelly Bean, in which you can do more Siri-like actions like say "what is the weather in San Francisco?" and have it read you back an answer.
"note to self"
"send email to"
"navigate to"
I agree re: the point about upgrading, but I can't think of any other justification for why this application isn't available on pre-4.1 phones. I am conscious that Google are struggling from more of an image problem - especially amongst developers - because of the Android fragmentation issue and moving people onto more advanced phones (especially their own hardware, like the Nexus series) will help drag that sub-1% install base on the latest version or whatever it is into a more reasonable figure that is competitive with Apple.
I find it weird that these advanced voice services aren't available pre-Jelly Bean. I wouldn't have thought it was a technical limitation - aren't all the voice commands just fired off into some cloudy thing anyway?
I can imagine they want to give people incentive to upgrade to a new phone, but Apple tried that with Siri and seemed to get routinely bashed for it. I haven't seen too many people (other than me :) bitching about it for Android though...
You get an overview of ALL stuff from ALL feeds, or just from invididual categories/feeds you selected (which acts recursively, which is awesome).
I am not sure if I am reading this right, but - can't you do this in Google Reader?
I can look at "All items", which is a view of every item from all my feeds. Or I can drill down to a category (e.g., 'Games', which is all my RSS feeds relating to video games). From there I can drill down to an individual feed (e.g., Blue's News) and read the items in that feed.
I used to use an app but I would find it very hard to go back to a non-Internet-based solution. Not sure if RSSOwl does it, but the fact that I can log into any of my PCs (or my phone) and have my feed reading exactly where l left it off last time is invaluable.
I disagree. The very problem is that the government does not fear it's citizens. They are not beholden to the citizens any more.
But... but... you have all those guns!?! Isn't that the point of having them?
Yeh, probably my big issue would be that videos uploaded should go to a region that is NOT the one that you are in, so that law enforcement in that country/state can not just arbitrarily have your video removed.
As I understand it there are still a few states in the US where recording the police is still a bit iffy? But if those videos where uploaded to somewhere like the Netherlands, you would have a higher level of confidence that they'd stay online.
I keep Qik video on my phone for this reason. It's an Android app that is developed by (or owned by?) the Skype guys. Videos are "instantly" uploaded online, although there's presumably a small time gap during which the upload is happening that the phone could be stopped/destroyed/etc.
Google serving ads is different. For anyone seaching for a product they can throw sponsored links at the top of the search results page and they are often relevant to the person searching. This particular advertising mechanism actually makes sense and is probably one of the most effective around. Not that everyone is doing a search where ads are welcome, but that nobody goes looking for products or services on Facebook ads there are never relevant to what people are doing. I suspect FB click-through rate is much lower than Googles. OTOH, FB ads have images and reflect your "likes" even if they are not related to what you're doing at the moment. I suppose the jury is still out on this.
That is true of the search network - but not so much the display network, which Google also aggressively push.
We are running a campaign for our software/web development company as an experiment at the moment. After reviewing the data I was surprised to see we only had a handful of clicks coming through from the 'Search' part of it - the vast majority came from the Display Network (i.e, sites/blogs/etc running Google AdSense to make money). In our first few days it was about a 70:3 ratio.
We decided to run it like that for 2 weeks and then turn off Display and see how it goes (this happened yesterday so no real data yet).
When I started looking for what people thought was the best strategy, I found (as you might expect) a lot of mixed opinions. I did find a Google whitepaper that suggested that using the Display network will result in a better net result, but I haven't read it closely yet.
We - like I imagine most businesses - are not just interested in clicks, we're interested in 'leads'. My data is obviously from a very small period of running ads, but so far it seems that the bulk of the traffic coming from the Display network is "unqualified" and will have a lower overall "yield" when compared to the Search traffic - people actively seeking stuff.
It is pretty interesting stuff to play with though, especially for me - I have no marketing/sales background; I know a lot of this stuff is old hat to people that have been doing it for a while but it's fascinating to see the differences in how people click and what they do in this sort of way.
Courtesy of my Dad and my uncles, I grew up with hundreds of Phantom comics around me. I probably started reading them around 5-6 and I still read them to this day.
The Phantom is a Batman-esque "superhero" in the sense that he is a mere human - no superpowers - who is out to stop crime. There are hundreds of different stories, many of them are suitable for children - violence is usually limited to the occasional punch in the face, and gunplay is almost always non-fatal (one of his skills is being able to shoot the guns out of the hands of criminals, so the worst thing you can really say about it is it gives a massively inaccurate portrayal of how easy it is to hit targets :)
I suspect it's probably hard to find in the US, but if you go to a comic store and look for the old copies you'll probably find a few. There are also annual releases and regular reprints of the great old copies you can pick up for a few bucks.
I don't think it is very big outside of Australia and parts of Scandinavia, but it's a great read that I think is awesome for kids to get into - they're fun, they generally have good themes of good triumphing over evil, and I think they'll encourage reading more than trying to dump books in their laps.