Courtesy of Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, this website tracks the class-action lawsuits against Sony in the wake of the rootkit disaster. One suit has been filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles, and another has been filed in the District Court in Southern New York. There’s also a guide to filing claims against Sony in various states’ small claims courts.
Historian and writer Randall Stross has a piece in today’s New York Times thanking Google for its innocuous but revolutionary use of text ads that appear on search results pages. The lucrative brainstorm turned off, in some fashion, the ever-increasingly obnoxious efforts by advertisers to get our attention with pop-ups and other intrusive messages.
Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no images, no animation. Just simple words, which would go either at the very top of the page, above the search results or, alternatively, as the experiment evolved, at the far right. These “sponsored links” had to conform to strict limits on length and aggressiveness in punctuation and phrasing. If you wanted to claim in your ad that you were the “best,” you had to display the third-party authority that authenticated the claim.
While banner ads and video pitches and other non-text commercial messages still saturate the web, things could be worse without Google, Stross contends.
TRUE, major ad buyers still spend a majority of their client’s online budgets on banners and display ads and, increasingly, on video commercials. But even in the deployment of these formats, one can see the effects of Google’s civilizing influence: these advertisements, for the most part, eschew the strong-arm tactics of earlier times. David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, said, “Paid search has brought to the fore the cliché ‘the consumer is in control,’ and there is no going back.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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