One of my guiding theories of the modern media / advertising landscape is that the extensive real time surveillance of consumers by online advertisers and content providers encourages the growth of content about digital cameras (the content about which is easily monetized) at the expense of hard news, especially international news about developing countries like […]
Category Archives: ads
Digital Cameras v. Nigeria
12-Aug-08I’ve been playing around with the new Google Insights for Search, which is targeted to advertisers but is terribly interesting for anyone interested in media issues. Here’s a comparison of searches for newspaper, blog, and magazine: Worldwide U.S. Nigeria Leaving aside the obvious qualifications about the limitations of this metric, the fact that blogs have […]
I’ve been looking at deep packet inspection / targeted advertising company Phorm for the past couple of days and have found a clear and simple case of Phorm violating its own privacy policy in contradiction to Ernst & Young’s audit of the company’s systems. Phorm has been energetically defending itself against complaints about the privacy […]
Google Adwords Category Exclusion
24-Jun-08Google recently added category exclusion to its adwords system, allowing advertisers to choose not to support content that deals with topics such as “death & tragedy” and “military & international conflict”. The new category exclusion feature allows an advertiser exclude from its content network any pages that belong to a specified set of topics or […]
Two Spectacles
28-Mar-08I’ve been pondering how the concept of spectacle fits in with surveillance. In particular, I’ve been bouncing around two different concepts of the spectacle, one by Michel Foucault and the other by Scott Bukatman. Here’s an execution spectacle in Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: ‘Finally, he was quartered,’ recounts the Gazette d’Amsterdam of 1 April […]
