[LINK] Google developing eavesdropping software

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:27 AM 9/7/2006, Craig Sanders wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 09:38:46AM +1000, Tom Worthington wrote:
> > ...PVR ... read the closed text captions ...
> > to select ads, much as good does for web pages
> > <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/adwords.shtml>.
>
>... i'm sure advertising people would love it, but why would the end user
>want it - or even tolerate it?...

If targeted well the end user will see fewer TV ads and those will be 
on topics they are interested in.

Advertisers will pay more for targeted ads, so fewer of them will be 
needed to pay for the program. Also if the ads are well targeted, 
they are likely to be more tolerable for the viewer. I would rather 
one minute of ads about something I might buy, than fifteen minutes 
of ads about toilet cleaner, which I never buy*.

Google does a reasonable job of making its web ads targeted, so that 
they are not such a burden. In my ANU seminar on Wednesday I forgot 
to suppress the ads on one web page I was showing. One of the 
audience pointed out the content in an ad, which was relevant and a 
useful contribution to the topic. This was a very targeted (pun 
intended) ad about military Link 16 communications protocols.

ps: * If you are worried about how I clean the toilet: a 
front-loading washing machine produces a bucket of sudsy water from 
each load of washing (I wrote a letter about it in the January-March 
2004 edition of ReNew magazine 
<http://www.ata.org.au/publications?page_id=15>).



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml