The advertisement model for monetising websites is age-old. Since people started looking at websites, they have been looking at ads. Google ads, Myspace ads, then later, the little squishy spider ad where you could win an XBOX (you never won an XBOX). It’s an easy way to make money from your site without having to develop a business model. Hell, sometimes your content isn’t able to earn its keep and ads or subscriptions are really the only way to make a bit of cash. All fine.

I don’t use ad-blocking software on my web browsers for a few reasons:

• They can be greedy and block things that I actually might want to see
• When developing websites which might have ads on, I always forget to disable them and spend an hour trying to figure out why ads are invisible
• I care that companies rely on ad income to perpetuate their content (on sites I regularly visit)

The first two reasons aside, I want to focus on the abuse of my care of a company’s income. Considering how easy it would be for me to just install some ad-blocking software in my browser, I don’t understand why companies insist on making me mad at their adverts. Take this, for example.

This is an ad in my face – it opened when the page loaded. I don’t block ads and I do actively click on things I might find interesting so that content creators get paid and keep on creating that content, so I’m insulted when these ads are thrust in my face. What’s more, I clicked the close link and the ad opened anyway. That is just shitty advertising.

So please, cool website owners (I’m looking at you, Kotaku), stop putting these horrible ads on your site. It cheapens your product and insults your users and I don’t want to have to stop reading your site like I did with Wired (in my defense, Wired is pretty terrible anyway).

Neven Mrgan (the original vowel-dropper) gave me a cool link-sharing idea (well, I think it’s cool anyway). He occasionally posts collections of Wikipedia links that he’s viewed recently and they make for interesting reading. You end up in some weird-ass Wikipedia articles if you spend long enough browsing. Same with sitting, watching crappy TV or waiting for trains or whatever.

With that in mind, I’ve been saving my mobile tabs because they’re representative of the random browsing I do! Steve Jobs seems to think that people don’t search on phones like they do on desktops. Physically, he’s got a point, but I don’t think there’s a huge difference. I make more impulsive, general knowledge searches on my phone, but that’s probably due to not doing my day job on my phone.

So, here’s the Safari tabs currently open on my phone:

Steph Thirion‘s (Eliss developer) tumblr

Music from The Hard Times of RJ Berger

LaTeX, document formatting markup

The girl who plays Celeste from Two and a Half Men’s Twitter

Programmable Midi footswitch thing – I really hope something like this comes out for AmpKit/iPhone.

Operation: Hulk Edition – I was convinced that Hasbro didn’t make Operation. Turns out Hasbro makes all the board games.

This song always gets stuck in my head and I always forget who it’s by (When in Rome – The Promise)

I don’t use last.fm any more, but this is cool-looking

This song is featured on all the TV shows. Heard it on Numb3rs – those guys are so good at picking music.

(as a side note, I wrote this on my phone – 3 fault starts because WordPress for iPhone sucks and crashes all the time. Horrible app)

The concept of a conference is a good one. Great minds in an industry coming together to share wisdom and spend time with others who share their passion and interest is a positive use of anyone’s time. The problem with things that look so great on paper is that, due to unforeseen variables, they often fall short of their potential. I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t enjoy FoWA and why I did in an attempt to understand whether I should go to them again, and attending dconstruct served to illustrate that I am a conferences guy, but I have to make some concessions and choose where I go carefully!

Firstly, I’m going to assume that every industry that has these things is the same. I know they’re not, but you understand that I’m talking about my own personal observations. Your mileage may vary and I’d like to know why it does, if you have time.

Humans are obsessed with celebrity. We love it. Those of us who believe ourselves to be above it are not. We go weak-kneed and fumbly when in the presence of our heroes and there’s no two ways about it. I don’t like this behaviour, but I am definitely not immune to it. I try to remember that people I consider to be celebrities are just people who’ve excelled in their field and gained a lot of recognition for what they do. They’re normal people who do normal things like apply deodorant and get their hair cut and cross the road and hate aubergines and we tend to forget this.

Conferences are a great way to create celebrities. If you’ve a relatively obscure interest, they effectively gather successful people to talk about how they got successful and tell you how to be more successful and that’s fundamentally a good thing. I think it’s important, however, to remember that the concept of a celebrity isn’t particularly healthy for the subject or the observer. On a long enough timeline, a subject will grow aware of and buy into their hype and become aloof (if they weren’t already!) and the observer will go to further extremes of their character type (the sycophant or the hater) and it becomes a self-perpetuating monster. No-one wants that.

Furthermore, as an attendee, you’re likely to be in love with what you do. You’re hardly going to sit for a whole day and listen to someone harp on about asparagus if you hate asparagus. Therefore, I think it’s important to have people talk conceptually on their subject. If you’re at a web development conference, listening to an evangelist preach HTML5 is redundant. You might make some conversions, but you shouldn’t be there to do that! The people who are going to embrace your talk will all know everything you’re going to say anyway, and the naysayers with conviction will probably just bitch about you on twitter.

So, why was dconstruct so good? For me, it was because people were talking in the abstract. I am a PHP developer primarily. I have other interests related to this industry but, gun to head, my day starts <?php and ends ?>. Whether I’m any good at it or not is irrelevant, but it’s not going to be beneficial to me to listen to another PHP developer talk about either why PHP is so good or why they’re so good at it. There was none of this at dconstruct.

(Quick disclaimer. What I took away from people’s talks isn’t necessarily what they were talking about, so if you’re one of the people I am talking about and I got it wrong, maybe you should consider your approach!)

Marty Neumeier’s talk on beating the game by getting ahead of it seemed like stating the obvious. He talked about four different types of new product (different-good, different-not-good, not-different-good and not-different-not-good) and, although I felt his process for identifying these products was flawed in that you had to wait until it had gone to market to really tell, he gave a good framework for new product developers to decide on whether something was worth the effort really only based on an idea. A lot of companies wouldn’t be failing if they listened to a guy like Marty talk for 30 minutes.

Brendan Dawes’ talk on how to get the most out of your product and process by removing as much of it as you feasibly can was quite inspirational to me. This is something that I have quite a strong opinion on not only because it can be a real money saver, but because it can also improve your overall product by removing the weak links. It was, therefore, reassuring to hear that someone I consider to be successful has had such success by following an ideal that I subscribe to. If you weren’t interested in what he was saying, the anecdotes, animations and accent should’ve been enough to involve you anyway.

David McCandless spoke about his approach to data visualisation and made me jealous that he’s been able to get access to stacks of data to do cool things with, but he also strikes me as the guy at the party who will call you in a week with an answer to whether there’s a correlation between breakups and major holidays, or whether cool is cooler than awesome. More than that, though, he made you feel like it’s good to be that guy, and it can be really rewarding and unpredictably interesting to investigate things in this way. He seems to be really inspired by social interactions, which I can relate to. I tend to obsess over byproducts of social interactions, and I was pleased to see that it can be productive!

Unfortunately, I was interrupted during James Bridle, so I think I missed a lot but what I did hear about the interconnectedness of data and the importance of revision as a journey (using Wikipedia and those awesome Iraq war volumes as a case in point) just hit the nail on the head. We have the ability as a hive to revise and collect all of our knowledge to educate and solve, and I hope this ability becomes part of everything. Wikipedia is criticised heavily for containing inaccurate information, but I rarely see it done by intelligent people. They’re too busy correcting the mistakes.

John Gruber spoke a lot about movies and Kubrick and I like both of those things.

Tom Coates’ presentation was like 8GB, and visually brilliant. Sadly, I don’t feel like I really gained anything from it. He spoke about the abstract concept of a network and how practical applications can benefit everyone. If you get a chance to see this, you should because he’s a great speaker!

Merlin Mann is an interesting guy. He doesn’t at all look like any picture I’ve ever seen of him. He spoke about the importance of being a nerd, how it’s dangerous to be comfortable with your abilities and making good choices. He’s basically the voice of all nerds, giving us a big hug and going “it’s ok, no great, to be a nerd but, in the interest of mortality, you should dial it down around people who don’t care”. The world needs nerds to obsess over the things that no-one else cares about. Nerds will constantly be trying to improve things that they disapprove of, and I don’t think that constant, objective improvement has ever been a bad thing. The A-bomb’s obviously terrible, but it’s a damn good example of a thing built to do a thing that does it fucking well. And it’s because of nerds.

I was a little disappointed that all-but-two of the talkers seemed to escape and not attend the after party. I knew that John Gruber would leave – he barely had any interest in getting up and speaking, much less mingling for five minutes with the people without whom he’d be nothing. That being said, it was nice to chat with Brendan about moviepeg and how, as a developer, I’m interested to see how designers approach things and elaborate on that a bit more, and it was cool to chat with Merlin further about embracing nerdism. I try not to be that guy who goes up to speakers and go YOU.WERE.GREAT because I don’t consider it to be constructive (and there are almost definitely enough people to do that without me chiming in), so I only attempted to talk to the people I felt like there was more to say to.

If you were there, or know anything about the speakers, you will notice that there are some omissions. My mum told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you should keep quiet (those of you who know me should see your faces!).

This has happened a couple of times to me on twitter. I’ll make a throwaway comment about a company, chuck in an @mention about them (not expecting a reply, but secretly hoping for one) and I actually get a response. This isn’t the first time it’s happened with LOVEFiLM, and it probably won’t be the last, but they’re just so good at it. The situation is really unavoidable and I didn’t expect them to do anything about it (and really, didn’t see anything they even could do about it!), but they rallied anyway.

After this interchange, I figure they don’t have the title, I can’t rent it and that’s why. It was really just a throwaway comment, because it’s the first film I’ve searched for that I haven’t been able to queue for reasons other than its release date not having passed. I have since received an email from a customer service representative:

Dear Jasper,

Further to our conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, “9″ is not currently available to rent from LOVEFiLM due to very recent problems with the supplier of rental copies. I‚m sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause you. If this situation changes we will of course let you know. To make it up to you we are crediting your account with a free rental.

Now, this is how you treat customers. I am on an unlimited plan, so an extra rental isn’t really going to affect me that much, but the gesture is the point. This shows me that, even though this isn’t a fault of theirs, they’re trying to show that they care about my experience with them, and (I hope you’re listening Panelfly and Sony Playstation – I know my updates are protected now, but they had weeks to respond before I did that!) ensure that every experience I have with their company ends with me being happy. You certainly nailed it again, LOVEFiLM.

We’re all agreed that the bigger a company gets the more evil it gets, but why is this? The two highest-profile (to me) and most recent are Facebook and Google. Remember when Google just wanted to show you ads on its search engine related to what you physically typed into it? Those were the good times. Now it wants to read your email (GMail), control your computer (GoogleOS), know what you’re doing when you’re not using Google products (GCal), be your mate (Buzz – seriously, wtf), know exactly what you’re looking at online (Chrome, Google DNS), look at all your pictures (Picasa), give your leg a tumour (Android) and even attach its phoneline to your house. I get justifying this to shareholders – “Imagine if we could read everyone’s email – we could put ads right there in people’s inbox!”, “Imagine if we powered everyone’s computer – we could show ads on their desktop/screensaver/bootscreen based on their internet usage”, and everyone gets a nice, shiny free product to play with.

But are these products really free? I mean, sure, you don’t put your credit card details into these things and there’s not a person sat monitoring everything you do and laughing when you put on some goat porn, but if you’re using Google DNS or Chrome then you can bet they have a record of someone at an IP you used doing it. And if you’re logged in to a Google product as well, you know all it takes is matching those IPs together and we’ve got a name and a face. So now, every time you turn on your Googleputer, there’s no reason NOT to show you a Google Ad for the latest installment of unmissable goat porn on your Google Desktop – you WATCHED it, so you must want to watch more! It stands to reason that when I have an email about Viagara in my inbox, I want to see ads for it too.

To me, that doesn’t make these products free. Sure, I use GMail, but only because I can hook it up to my mail client and forego the ads, I use the search because it’s fast and integrated with almost everything and I use GCal for work, but think about the type of data you’re giving companies access to before you actually use these “free” services. If you don’t know what DNS is, but you know Google’s is pretty fast – find out what DNS is before you tell a company EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT, NO EXCEPTIONS. If you like the sound of a free operating system, think about what it means to give a company access to ANYTHING you do on your computer. I’m not saying this is the case, but if you don’t want to pay for an OS; there are plenty of amazing, free ones around.

Google has quickly learned from twitter that knowing about your users as in where they are or what their name is, or what someone said in an email isn’t worth nearly as much as knowing every little thing about our lives. Where you’re going to eat, what you ate when you got there, what you’re reading, what you recommend, what movies you like, where you work, what you do whilst you’re at work, all of that makes anything you’ve got with a screen and a Google product on the potential to be a tiny billboard for any type of thing that can be programmatically deemed applicable to you – and it’s not independently moderated – if someone finds out you like the sound of an iPad, you aren’t going to be getting legit ads on where to get one, you’re going to be getting shitty “GET A FREE IPAD IF YOU JUST GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS AND MAIL US YOUR FIRST CHILD” ads. You’ve seen Google text ads, right? You might even use a plugin in your web browser to block them, so why open yourself up to have them put all over your life?!

It’s hard to blame Google for this, and they’re not the only ones. I mentioned Facebook; they’re getting just as bad, and they’ll probably end up worse, and this is why. You willingly tell Facebook EVERYTHING. Date of birth, who you’re related to, stuff you like, your employment history, political views, music taste, everything. You then proceed to give it up-to-the-minute information on all the stuff that’s catching your attention now. You’re a fickle idiot, and so was I until this all occurred to me. What’s potentially worse about Facebook is that you’re telling all of this stuff to them, giving them all your secrets, and they’re giving this data to anyone who knows a web developer. When you install an application, I bet you don’t read what they get access to – those little cancerous quizzes have access to “your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that [it] requires to work”. Do you really like quizzes enough to tell Johnny Nobody all that stuff about you? I don’t.

So, what’s the point in this? Mark Zuckerberg says that “privacy is no longer a social norm“, and I agree. Everything that you can write down about yourself can be leveraged to try and sell you something. Fair enough, it could be something that you might want, but I want that ball to always stay in my court. If I want to buy something, I’ll look for it. Eric Schmidt says that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“. This is utter bullshit. You’re entitled to have secrets and you should have secrets. Maybe don’t tweet about them, or post them on your Facebook wall, but they’re not secrets if you’re doing that. What Mr. Schmidt is saying there is “if you have a secret and you use one of my company’s products, I’m going to use that secret to get some scammer to try and sell you shit”.

Now, I’m not against avertising. It can be pretty useful. However, Google used to just be a box to search stuff in. Then it was a box to search stuff in with ads on it, then it was an online equivalent of everything you used to do on your desktop computer. Now it’s all that stuff from before, plus it’s got its own backup of the internet, and soon it’ll have phonelines. It’s always changing the game, and it keeps all that stuff it had from before. No matter how they decide to change the game up, they’re always going to know everything you’ve ever told them, whether you know they did or not. Same with Facebook. So, think about what you’re telling websites about yourself and who might end up knowing that stuff and, if in doubt, walk outside with your eyes closed and tell the first person you bump into what you were going to tell that website – if you’re comfortable with them knowing it then you’re OK!