Developing Upwards

Have you ever had the situation where you can't tell if an annoyance on the part of some software is caused by bad user experience design or bad marketing decisions? Of course, we could make a case that all marketing decisions are, by definition, user experience decisions. Still, I am left to wonder today when I made the usual move to click on a webpage background to focus my browser and inadvertently clicked on an advertisement I was not interested in. I clicked on the margin of the page, which is my usual habit: What I didn't realize was that a simple scroll upward would have revealed this about the margin: Oh, you sneaky sneaky Visual Studio 2010 ad! So, which was it?

Do you remember when you were walking down the street and you saw that billboard for an injury law firm, so you punched the billboard and were teleported magically to their offices? How about that commercial break during an episode of Friends , for a brand of tooth paste. Do you remember kicking your TV and bottles of toothpaste falling out of it with the shattered glass and smoke? If you don't remember these events, why do online advertisers want you to hit their banners right then and there, which is so different from how you are used to getting advertisements? Because, you know and they know, that if they do their job right, you'll remember them later, when you need to. In this light, I propose a new advertising model for the Web: AdMarks. I see ads for things all the time that I would buy, or want to buy, but that doesn't mean I can buy them right now, or have an immediate need for them. I'm not about to follow the banner, open a new window up, read about it, bookma...

I've been toying with the idea of increasing how much I might get back from this little place. At times it gets down right exciting to watch my hits rise day after day, until I get writers block again and drop back to double digits for a month or so. I can't help but listen to the entrepenourial spirit in me that suggests a little more devotion and disipline on my part would push the pocket pennies to a threshold the likes of my ramen-eating self would just drool over. Hell, I could even buy two flavors of ramen. So, I played with a few things. I naively made an attempt to jury-rig my Google Adsense snippets into my actual posts, to test what would come up in my reader. Squat, that's what. I looked around for feed-specific advertising services, and I found nothing but closed betas. I was seriously surprised at the lack of services in this area. Anyone who gets there first is going to have a serious advantage. Now, many someone is there first, so let me rephrase it as ...

My adsense experiment didn't pan out. I shouldn't be surprised. I forgot about the Adsense for Feeds Beta. If that exists, then obviously the normal adsense doesn't work for feeds. I'll leave them in, anyway, just to see what happens with the channels on the front page. Took a look at web.py to see if it could be useful for our needs, but I really can't tell entirely. I don't think so, however. The documentation is just way too sparse.