web,ads,kindle,amazon,ebooks,targeted ads

I just read an article by Jared Newman on Macworld’s web site talking about Amazon’s new, "Ad Supported" Kindle. According to the article (and Amazon’s web site), Amazon will be offering a version of it’s Kindle Reader that supports ads for $114, a whole $25 off the $139 regular price. For this sizable discount, you receive ads on the device’s screensaver and main menu.

What an offensive idea! What would be more offensive is targeted ads on your Kindle Reader: you do have to register your device which means they have access to your purchasing history via your account. Hence targeted ads.

Allow me a relevant digression…

Ads are certainly not a new thing. In addition to tradition sources like Amazon and Google, new services are entering the fray. Apple’s iAds is a good example of an up and coming player and with their share of the music player and tablet market, they could get big in a hurry!

Targeted ads aren’t new either. Amazon, Google and others have been doing it for years now. In an effort to make more money per view (or per click), businesses and web sites use targeted ads. Blogs with large followings have significant bandwidth needs which means you’ve to get a revenue stream from somewhere (or pay for it yourself). Free social websites, like Facebook, target ads based on your profile. I’m single with an interest in photography so I’m always seeing ads for photo kit and dating web sites. (I’m pretty sure there are no dating sites for single photographers or I’d be seeing those too!)

Back to the main topic…Amazon and its ad-enabled Kindle. What if they start puting ads, random or targeted, into your eBooks. They could be beneath the cover pick, befor the Table of Contents, every so many pages or randomly spread throughout the book? The author of the article on Macworld said that "If e-books could be had for cheap—or even free—in exchange for the occasional ad, I’d download them by the dozen."¹

Let me go on record right now as saying this is a bad idea. Especially if they are free. While I am generally in favor of anything that will increase reading and expanding the reader’s vocabulary, not to mention teaching people that "4" is not a preposition, the whole idea is just…wrong. If I want a book the latest information and advertising, I’ll read a magazine. If I want real cutting  edge info, I’ll go to the web and put up with the ads there. Books are a different animal. I may buy a book and not read it for two years (my "to be read" pile is rather large). The ads you put in the book are long out of date so why bother? Or if you’re going to serve the latest ads, are you going to force me to connect to the publishing server every time I want to read the book or just when I open it for the first time? And what happens if you are in the middle of nowhere and you want to read your book?

"You could always do low-cost or no-cost versions with ads and a higher priced version without the ads," you say. Part of it comes back to the "how do I make a living?" question. I partially answered that question here and so I shant repeat myself. And no, I don’t have any more of the answer to the although Cory Doctorow’s might by suggesting what used to be heresy: self-publishing or publish on demand.

Regardless, I don’t want any ads in my eBook at any price! If I want to read a magazine, I hope it’s on Zinio, a digital magazine distributer.

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1. The original paragraph is "Am I the only one who thinks this is too bad? If e-books could be had for cheap—or even free—in exchange for the occasional ad, I’d download them by the dozen." The semantic construction is terrible; it leaves you with two interpretations: (i) the idea that ads in eBooks is a bad thing, or (2) that ads in eBooks is a good thing. Based on his second sentence I assume he is pro ads in eBooks.

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highways,concrete,total lack of character

Call me silly but I hate highways. Sure, they sometimes get you where you want to go a bit faster (that is debatable; c.f., rush-hour in you favorite dictionary) and I guess they make it easier to locate things (again, debatable) but they totally lack character. They all look the same. Just miles and miles of concrete, frequently with concrete walls embracing them to cut down the noise that would otherwise flood nearby developments but that’s it!

Recently, a friend showed me a "back route" out of Anthem that gets me to the Loop 101 (yes a freeway!). The nice thing though is that it takes you through developments and by businesses. You get to see trees and cactus and other flora. What you don’t see are miles and miles of concrete or smell the diesel fumes of the truck front of you or get cut off by the idiot who wants to get somewhere 0.2 seconds faster!

There’s beauty in side streets, you just have to find it!

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social commentary,technology,stupid politicians

Usually I’m immune to the stupid antics of politicians. They can’t help it. Most are lawyers so that’s two strikes against them. But this is just ridiculous.

I read the story on CNN.com: Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police. The opening paragraph reads "Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations."

Did you notice those two words that say "home users?" If you have a Wi-Fi access point or you have a wired network in your home, in short, anything that assigns temporary IP addresses as machines come and go, you would be required to maintain logs for two years.

And why are we doing this? "For the children." The goal is to give law enforcement the data they need to go after people who share child porn on the Internet.

They are calling it the "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both the House (H.R.1076) and Senate (S.436) versions contain the same basic language: A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.

Ignoring the privacy issues for the moment, and the issues for small and big business, let’s just focus on Joe Home Owner. How do the politicians think they are going to implement this? Ok, the politicians won’t. They just pass the law and hand it off to a team of bureaucrats to implement. How are the bureaucrats going to implement it? In particular, how are they going to get owners of all those home access points to keep logs? Most people have a hard enough time configuring their Wi-Fi access point securely! How are they going to get Joe Home Owner to keep logs of IP addresses? How do you guarantee the integrity of those logs? If you can’t, I can see defense counsel getting them tossed out of court real quick.

Since we are poking holes in this boat, the bills say you have to keep the logs for at least two years. What do you do with the log when it gets to the two year point? Anyone who does security in the business world will tell you that if you have a policy – say, for email retention – you have to follow the policy. There can be serious legal consequences if you don’t. So what about these address logs? Two years and then…what? What happens if the house burns down and you don’t have offsite backups for the logs. What if a thief breaks into you house and steals the machine that holds the logs? What about when Joe Home Owner fat-fingers something and manages to delete them accidentally? And what happens when the lawyers want to use them in a messy divorce or a civil or criminal case?

Am I getting my point across? This isn’t a simple thing. You can’t just say "make it so" and have it happen. There are always unintended consequences to this kind of thing.

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finances,mortgage mess

Let me start by saying I’m not a financial whiz. There are days when I think I shouldn’t even be allowed to have any money – and no, I won’t sign my paycheck over to you!

That said, people need to get over the “It’s not my fault people bought a bigger house than they could afford!” or “It’s the bank’s fault! They made loans knowing people would be in trouble in a couple of years!” or “I shouldn’t have to bail them out!” or whatever the diatribe of the nonce is. No, maybe you were smarter than the average bear and, no, in a perfect world people would pay for their own mistakes. But the fact is the situation has to be fixed. The longer we delay, the worse it gets.

We all have a vested interest in getting the economy back on some sort of track. That is unless you like seeing your home’s value decrease and your 401-K plan’s value decrease and all your other assets go “poof!” and disappear. What do you plan to do when you want to sell your home? Give it away? What you going to do when you want to buy a home or a car? Unless you have the money in the bank in cash you’re going to need credit. You know, that thing that’s reallly hard to get right now.

Enough with the “it’s not my fault” already because it just doesn’t matter! It’s kind of like the people on the Titanic yelling "I shouldn’t end up in the water because I wasn’t the one who hit the iceberg!" At some point you just have to acknowledge that we’re all in this crisis and we all need to work together to get out of it.

It’s called the common good.

Now, here are your crayons. Shut up and color!

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shallow people

While reading the Photoshelter blog, I came across this post about the latest craze for bride’s maids: Botox injections, checmical peels, and breast enhancements. The post linked to an article at the New York Time’s web site called It’s Botox for You, Dear Bridesmaids.

At first I thought it was a joke but according to the article, this is the latest trend in weddings. It makes sense though, right? I mean, why Photoshop the pictures when you can fix the people? Should save photographers hours of post-processing for every wedding!

Hello! Are we just stupid? Are we really that vapid? I can’t figure out which group is more ridiculous: the brides who ask or the bridesmaids who do it.

Here at cawilliams.us, we aren’t getting a face lift or augmenting body parts but we are mostly done with the makeover. A few things to finish on the Photoshelter end of the site but otherwise I think I like it. The blog is now running on the latest version of WordPress (2.6). No issues with the upgrade but it was time consuming. I’m thinking of redoing the header portion of the blog so it matches the rest of the site but over all, I think I’m liking it!

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