Archive for June, 2007
Bush of Arabia
Sunday, June 24th, 2007There is no such thing as political altruism. A nation cannot aid another nation without fighting a shared enemy or the promise of economic enslavement.
Mark dragged Arthur & me to see Lawrence of Arabia at The Aero last night. The movie stars Karl Rove as Mr. Dryden and parallels British involvement with Arabs in World War I to US involvement with Arabs now.
A few outstanding lines:
Reporter: “What, in your opinion, do these people hope to gain from this war?”
Lawrence: “They hope to gain their freedom.”
Reporter to Prince: “We Americans were once a colonial people. We naturally feel sympathetic to any people who struggle for their freedom.”
Lawrence: “Take English engineers and you take English government.”
Prince: “Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.”
Lawrence: “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people — greedy, barbarous, and cruel.”
Missed Targeted Advertising
Saturday, June 16th, 2007Targeted advertising is advertising chosen for you based on information a website knows about you. Typically, this advertising is limited to your geographic location. For example, if you live in Los Angeles, you might see a banner ad for locally owned LA business, but someone in Wisconsin will not.
MySpace knows more about its visitors than most websites. For example, MySpace knows that I’m gay because I set my “sexual orientation” in my profile to “gay”. I exclusively see banner advertisements for RealJock.com, True.com, Match.com, Dlist.com, and every gay social networking site ever created. ever.
I also put that I graduated from Emerson College into my profile. A second type of targeted advertising is “context sensitive” advertising — banner ads selected by analyzing the text content of a page. Context advertisements are only as smart as the surrounding text on a page. MySpace’s context sensitive ads see the text “Emerson College”, but do not know the “I graduated from there” part of my profile. The result of this incapacity is below:
This is an example of a company shooting the advertising arrow and hitting the wrong target. Instead of encouraging me to use its site to review graduate schools, CollegeProwler.com has insulted me by saying my undergraduate degree isn’t from a respectable institution.
Update: June 28
My complaint made it all the way to College Prowler’s CEO. Luke had “NO IDEA [they] were doing this” and assured me that this type of advertising “will stop very soon”.
