insights from the digital future
I tried GoDaddy once years ago and absolutely hated it. But today I decided I wanted to register a .tv domain today and it seemed that GoDaddy had the most reasonable rate (advertised at $15.99). But every time I click “proceed to check out” Firefox bugs out. Anyone else have this problem? The conspiracy theorist approach would be to blame GoDaddy’s CEO, whose VP of domain auctions, auspiciously named Adam Dicker, was recently found to be gaming the domain name bidding system.
A couple months ago I was put off after seeing a friend in a sidebar ad on Facebook and realizing that I likely appeared on the sidebar of my friend’s Facebooks without my knowing.
At left, you’ll see Tom Lewis aka TomDog purporting to endorse a Facebook App. Sure, he probably is a “fan” of the app but I doubt he realizes that his image is being used in this manner on his friends’ sidebar.
There IS a way to opt out of your likeness being used in this paid ads for Facebook Apps, although it is not entirely easy to find the opt-out page.
Log-in to Facebook, go to “privacy” at the top right, click “News Feed and Mini-Feed,” then select the “Social Ads” tab within the module and change “Appearance in Social Ads” to No One. Screenshot below. Anyone else have issues with this?
Continue reading “How to Opt-Out of Appearing in Facebook Ads”
I had to chuckle this morning when I revisited a year-old post about Lara Logan (it’s been receiving traffic lately in the aftermath of her appearance last week on The Daily Show) and found this John McCain for President Google image ad at the bottom of the page:
SearchEngineWatch points to a couple interviews in which Google Ad execs predict that both candidates Obama and McCain will depend heavily on Adwords bidding wars and that the Clinton campaign was inconsistent with it’s usage of Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms.
According to Adsense’s cost-estimate tool, the keyword Obama costs an estimated $0.88 – $1.23 per click (CPC). So, essentially the party who wishes to advertise on a website contextually relevant to the keyword “Obama” would have to outbid other potential advertisers. “Barack Obama” scored similarly on estimated CPC, but the estimated CPC for “McCain” is $1.23 – $1.85 — signficantly higher, implying that someone is driving up the bidding to advertise on websites/blogs featuring the word “mccain.” It comes as little surprise to find Barack Obama ads at the bottom of my posts that feature McCain. Yet, in the instance of the Lara Logan post, I’m betting that the McCain ad was picking up the “Iraq” keyword and advertising on that (Obama-related posts appear to be plastered with pro-Obama Google ads).
Inspired by this Google Trends chart of Twitter v. Friendfeed posted by Ole Begemann I threw the new, horizontally dynamic visual timeline updating comment threading microblogging platform Plurk into the mix.
I tried Plurk a couple weeks back for a day. Returned on the following two days and have not returned since. There are way too many of these types of services and they don’t dynamically reflect and refract as they should. Same reason I latched onto FriendFeed as opposed to the — possibly more attractive and fun to use — SocialThing. But what IS interesting is that — according to Google Trends’ calculations, Plurk.. in only a few weeks… has set a higher trend base/level than Friendfeed — whether this is because friendfeed is widely accessed via third party apps such as Facebook, Twhirl, and AlertThingy, I’m not sure. But what is interesting is that it appears to be quite sticky and in Brazil and Taiwan is already out-“trending” Friendfeed.