In college, I worked in the electronics dept. of a big dept. store chain on the U.S. west coast. One day I helped a (seemingly) nice guy buy about $300 worth of car stereo equipment. He paid with a credit card. A couple weeks later, he came back and bought a $500 camcorder, also with a credit card. A couple weeks after that, I get a message that the head of corporate security wants me to call her. I worked the night shift, so I couldn't get ahold of her. But a couple days later, I see the guy's picture on the front page of the local paper. Turns out he had murdered an old guy a few states over and took his credit cards. I checked signatures and ID after that.
Don't they just open connections to an IRC channel and wait for commands? That doesn't seem like it takes much inter-machine communication. Heck, you could do that in just a few lines of Perl.
I run a site that reviews films on DVD, and I don't see any of my site's reviews among the results. How is Google deciding what is a review, and how are they parsing it for scores?
In college I worked in the electronics department of a department store. I don't remember if it was store policy or not, but when someone would bring in a movie, CD, computer game, etc. as defective, we would open the new copy before we gave it to them. It was probably that we were all young, vindictive bastards rather than official policy. We'd also send opened packages back to the warehouse with bogus defects like "bad motivator." Ah, good times.
I picked up a PS1 long after it was fashionable to have one. One of the few games I had was Tekken 3. After about an eight-hour ass-kicking session, I went to bed and had nightmares about a giant panda chasing me around and trying to kill me. Pandas now give me the heebie-geebies.
It's hard to convince advertisers that they're paying for mindshare instead of results, because the internet tends to be so result-driven (search for something, get exactly what you want; click on something, have it take you to what you expected). We tried this sort of advertising model on DVD Verdict, and are still trying. We got one fairly well-known television network to buy ad space, which they wanted to use to drive traffic to their own online store. At the end of the trial month, they were upset that the thousands of impressions only resulted in one sale on their site. Perhaps if their ad had been geared toward making people remember that they *had* an online store, perhaps with exclusive content, then maybe it would've been effective in the long term. But alas, all they cared about were raw sales in the short term.
Per Inquery or Per Order are really the only ways to sell advertising on the net. The big guy doesn't get ripped off, and the little guy doesn't get run over.
The problem is the amount of labor it takes to track this. There has to be a way for both the advertiser and the advertising firm to track the sales and or actual product inqueries, in a manner that both can trust.
But what you're really describing are affiliate programs. I use Amazon's program on my site, and it works very well. Amazon is happy because they get advertising for the products they sell. I'm happy because I get revenue. Visitors are happy because the "advertising" is unobtrusive and they actually get something out of it. I also use AdSense in a limited fashion, mostly because it's too difficult to ensure that the ads are going to be relevant (not to mention poach potential buyers away from the Amazon links) and the revenue potential is much lower than Amazon.
I'd love to see the affiliate advertising model applied in other area, but you pointed out all the problems with it - mostly it's a lot of hassle to track. Perhaps Amazon should leverate A9.com and/or Alexa and provide context-sensitive links to products? I don't think they offer anything like that yet in a friendly package like Google has with their AdSense ad codes. One could roll their own, but most webmasters don't want to go to the effort.
The free version of Ad-Aware is also not licensed for corporate use. If this is as big an installation as the poster suggests, then they need to be concerned about that.
And I even made a plain HTML version of it that didn't do all the SQL queries this morning just in case it got posted. My lack of faith in the Slashdot Effect is disturbing...
Microsoft licensed the playlist content from Nielsen. Wouldn't the call letters and slogans have been part of what they licensed from Nielsen? In that case, shouldn't the stations be contacting Nielsen for selling the usage rights to their slogans?
I remember people complaining when one of the Wing Commander titles required you to have a better-than-stock 386 be able to play. Cutting-edge games have always driven sales of new equipment.
I think it's just a case of someone picking his favorite role, like someone listing ZARDOZ as one of Sean Connery's credits, or CABIN BOY as one of Tim Burton's production credits.
To be totally serious, doesn't anyone else think this may up the security and tighten who they'll let in E3?
Why? Even if they lost the demo of *one* game (albeit a hotly anticipated one, I'm sure, at least among the PlayStation crowd), by not letting in tons of gamers they would lose the viral marketing potential. They'll post on discussion boards. They'll talk in IRC. They'll tell all their offline friends.
On the other hand, what they should do is invite in just a few of the unwashed, Cheeto-eating gamers, make them sign an NDA, and then wait for the anonymous reports to show up on...whatever site is to the gaming world what Ain't It Cool News is to the movie world.
What do they define as "playable"? Until yesterday I was playing UT2004 on a GeForce2 (rest of the system is a P4 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM)...granted at 640x480 with most of the detail levels set low, but it was still playable (and a hell of a lot of fun). Then I picked up a cheapie GeForce FX5200, and it's a lot sweeter.
Slashdot Mirror
In college, I worked in the electronics dept. of a big dept. store chain on the U.S. west coast. One day I helped a (seemingly) nice guy buy about $300 worth of car stereo equipment. He paid with a credit card. A couple weeks later, he came back and bought a $500 camcorder, also with a credit card. A couple weeks after that, I get a message that the head of corporate security wants me to call her. I worked the night shift, so I couldn't get ahold of her. But a couple days later, I see the guy's picture on the front page of the local paper. Turns out he had murdered an old guy a few states over and took his credit cards. I checked signatures and ID after that.
Don't they just open connections to an IRC channel and wait for commands? That doesn't seem like it takes much inter-machine communication. Heck, you could do that in just a few lines of Perl.
I run a site that reviews films on DVD, and I don't see any of my site's reviews among the results. How is Google deciding what is a review, and how are they parsing it for scores?
In college I worked in the electronics department of a department store. I don't remember if it was store policy or not, but when someone would bring in a movie, CD, computer game, etc. as defective, we would open the new copy before we gave it to them. It was probably that we were all young, vindictive bastards rather than official policy. We'd also send opened packages back to the warehouse with bogus defects like "bad motivator." Ah, good times.
I picked up a PS1 long after it was fashionable to have one. One of the few games I had was Tekken 3. After about an eight-hour ass-kicking session, I went to bed and had nightmares about a giant panda chasing me around and trying to kill me. Pandas now give me the heebie-geebies.
I for one welcome our new robotic overlords...
Active-X control required? So now we're giving websites direct control of our hardware? All yours, kid.
Oh, but wait, DVD File is owned by InterActual, the makers of PC Friendly! All is right with the world!
It's hard to convince advertisers that they're paying for mindshare instead of results, because the internet tends to be so result-driven (search for something, get exactly what you want; click on something, have it take you to what you expected). We tried this sort of advertising model on DVD Verdict, and are still trying. We got one fairly well-known television network to buy ad space, which they wanted to use to drive traffic to their own online store. At the end of the trial month, they were upset that the thousands of impressions only resulted in one sale on their site. Perhaps if their ad had been geared toward making people remember that they *had* an online store, perhaps with exclusive content, then maybe it would've been effective in the long term. But alas, all they cared about were raw sales in the short term.
Per Inquery or Per Order are really the only ways to sell advertising on the net. The big guy doesn't get ripped off, and the little guy doesn't get run over.
The problem is the amount of labor it takes to track this. There has to be a way for both the advertiser and the advertising firm to track the sales and or actual product inqueries, in a manner that both can trust.
But what you're really describing are affiliate programs. I use Amazon's program on my site, and it works very well. Amazon is happy because they get advertising for the products they sell. I'm happy because I get revenue. Visitors are happy because the "advertising" is unobtrusive and they actually get something out of it. I also use AdSense in a limited fashion, mostly because it's too difficult to ensure that the ads are going to be relevant (not to mention poach potential buyers away from the Amazon links) and the revenue potential is much lower than Amazon.
I'd love to see the affiliate advertising model applied in other area, but you pointed out all the problems with it - mostly it's a lot of hassle to track. Perhaps Amazon should leverate A9.com and/or Alexa and provide context-sensitive links to products? I don't think they offer anything like that yet in a friendly package like Google has with their AdSense ad codes. One could roll their own, but most webmasters don't want to go to the effort.
He talks about this pretty regularly on his blog: He uses Linux (Mandrake, IIRC) and a Mac. No Windows.
BTW, what was with the llama thing anyway? The developers watched too much Jimmy Neutron?
The free version of Ad-Aware is also not licensed for corporate use. If this is as big an installation as the poster suggests, then they need to be concerned about that.
And I even made a plain HTML version of it that didn't do all the SQL queries this morning just in case it got posted. My lack of faith in the Slashdot Effect is disturbing...
Microsoft licensed the playlist content from Nielsen. Wouldn't the call letters and slogans have been part of what they licensed from Nielsen? In that case, shouldn't the stations be contacting Nielsen for selling the usage rights to their slogans?
And I'm one of them. Woot! Heading to Vegas, I'm on a lucky streak!
I remember people complaining when one of the Wing Commander titles required you to have a better-than-stock 386 be able to play. Cutting-edge games have always driven sales of new equipment.
I think it's just a case of someone picking his favorite role, like someone listing ZARDOZ as one of Sean Connery's credits, or CABIN BOY as one of Tim Burton's production credits.
...is finally coming to fruition!
To be totally serious, doesn't anyone else think this may up the security and tighten who they'll let in E3? Why? Even if they lost the demo of *one* game (albeit a hotly anticipated one, I'm sure, at least among the PlayStation crowd), by not letting in tons of gamers they would lose the viral marketing potential. They'll post on discussion boards. They'll talk in IRC. They'll tell all their offline friends. On the other hand, what they should do is invite in just a few of the unwashed, Cheeto-eating gamers, make them sign an NDA, and then wait for the anonymous reports to show up on...whatever site is to the gaming world what Ain't It Cool News is to the movie world.
What do they define as "playable"? Until yesterday I was playing UT2004 on a GeForce2 (rest of the system is a P4 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM)...granted at 640x480 with most of the detail levels set low, but it was still playable (and a hell of a lot of fun). Then I picked up a cheapie GeForce FX5200, and it's a lot sweeter.
Finally, someone who shares my obsession!