The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.
Link tags: bubble
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Contextual ads | Dave Smyth
If behavioural ads aren’t more effective than contextual ads, what is all of that data collected for?
If websites opted for a context ads and privacy-focused analytics approach, cookie banners could become obsolete…
Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple — Pixel Envy
See, that’s what I’m talking about;
Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.
TheirTube
Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent
The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).
It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.
A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).
We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.
This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.
The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!
Break out of the echo chamber - Andy Bell
So much of my echo chamber is consumed by people, including myself, who have a very dim view of JavaScript frameworks being thrown at everything, arguing with the people who are in the process of throwing JavaScript frameworks at everything. We forget one very important thing, though: we represent the minority of the web community and our arguments probably look very pointless and silly to the majority.
Word Bubbles — The Man in Blue
Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.
Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous: Paul Ford - Bloomberg
An astoundingly great piece of writing from Paul Ford, comparing the dot-com bubble and the current blockchain bubble. This resonates so hard:
I knew I was supposed to have an opinion on how the web and the capital markets interacted, but I just wanted to write stuff and put it online. Or to talk about web standards—those documents, crafted by committees at the World Wide Web consortium, that defined the contract between a web browser and a web server, outlining how HTML would work. These standards didn’t define just software, but also culture; this was the raw material of human interaction.
And, damn, if this isn’t the best description the post-bubble web:
Heat and light returned. And bit by bit, the software industry insinuated itself into every aspect of global enterprise. Mobile happened, social networks exploded, jobs returned, and coding schools popped up to convert humans into programmers and feed them to the champing maw of commerce. The abstractions I loved became industries.
Oof! That isn’t even the final gut punch. This is:
Here’s what I finally figured out, 25 years in: What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets.
PonziCoin
Yet another cryptocurrency …except that this was meant to be satire.
This has gotten crazy out of hand, I apologize but we will no longer be selling PonziCoin on this site because this was a joke.
The Advertising Bubble (Idle Words)
The prognosis for publishers is grim. Repent! Find a way out of the adtech racket before it collapses around you. Ditch your tracking, show dumb ads that you sell directly (not through a thicket of intermediaries), and beg your readers for mercy. Respect their privacy, bandwidth, and intelligence, flatter their vanity, and maybe they’ll subscribe to something.
James Somers – Web developer money
A well-written piece on the nature of work and value on the web, particularly in the start-up economy.
BrianOberkirch.com – Oh, You Wanted the Douchy Web?
Brian says what we're all thinking (or rather, what we would all be thinking if we actually wasted valuable brain cells thinking about TechC*nt).
The Eachday Blog — Die Speech Bubble Logo, Die.
“Attention all startups, it’s a bad idea to hang your ID hat on a speech bubble. Just don’t.”
Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | This is a bubble that won't burst
"Not only did the head of Waterstone's underestimate the internet. Even Rupert Murdoch was caught out"