The Internet

Right now I'm thinking about the Internet, the all-pervasive medium through which I've published my thoughts and work I've done in my free time for several years now. Like mostly everyone else, I communicate with others using the Internet, play games through it, read news, and learn about things. (Except, sadly, I am not convinced the general public is interested in learning.) And we are all familiar with the "dot com mania" and the insane rise in the NASDAQ - and, sadly, the subsequent fall of the NASDAQ. People have been wondering exactly what was behind all of this, and if the Internet - which once seemed so enticing - is now bogus.

"What we are entering is a power age, and the importance of the power age lies in its ability, rightly used with the wage motive behind it, to increase and cheapen production so that all of us may have more of this world's goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power" - Henry Ford Here's something which should not be news: the entire .com insanity was a crock from the start! That's right - the entire New Economy was founded on delusions and misinformation all along. But just as people were overzealous then, they are overly pessimistic now (at the time of this writing). The Internet is not intrinsically a crock. But the general public got a taste of what the Internet can do, and warped and distorted it into a magical cure-all for all of life's problems. The Internet cannot produce material objects; only industry can. The Internet can near-instantaneously transport information from any location to any location, but it cannot transport atoms. And while information is fun and happy, many other things we enjoy (such as books (for now), pizza, and computers!) are made of heavy, sluggish atoms. Throwing up a web site does not automatically mean instant wealth, nor does a name that ends in ".com". This has always been true, and will continue to be true (for a while...), but for a short time most everyone deluded themselves into believing the exact opposite. And even technically knowledgeable people (such as myself, and many others who knew what the Internet was before everyone and his uncle came onto the scene) were caught up in the hysteria, because the Internet is indeed really cool, and it seemed it was the time when everyone was becoming aware of that fact too. We always knew that advertising on the Internet was a crock, but we underestimated the general public's ability to come to their senses (I know, I know - it's still just a little unbelievable that they could have figured it out eventually). We live in a power age. The Information Age which we are entering enhances power; it makes production more efficient, communication more efficient and widespread, organization more effective, and a myriad of other things. The Internet lubricates our current system, and makes things easier. It is not magical, though, and we all have to confront reality.

Take, for example, advertising on the Internet. But first, let's look at a simpler case (assume the cow is spherical): advertising in magazines and television. Now, we all can agree that almost all advertising is evil and useless. In my case, I hate cars - I hate driving cars, hearing about cars, or thinking about cars. Now, a disgusting amount of advertising on television, and in magazines too, is advertisements about cars. I presume this is done because while few people at any one time are looking to buy a car, any individual car purchase makes large profits for the companies, so it is worthwhile to advertise the things. But such advertisements are worthless when directed at me, because I have no desire to buy the things, nor will they kindle such a need in me. It's a waste of their time, and my time. So the first lesson: improperly targeted advertising is worthless. In television and magazines, the things advertised happen to be what most of the people reading or watching that medium want to buy, so the advertisers make money, the TV shows and magazines make money, and the general public gets their TV shows for free and their magazines and (especially) newspapers for trivial sums of money. All is well. Why does it fail so badly and so spectacularly when applied to the Internet?

This is, of course, for reasons that I and many others (but not enough of them!) have seen for quite a while. Internet advertising has been a crock from the start. First of all, it is almost always spectacularly horribly targeted. Let's focus on banners (the most innocuous form) for a while. If I am visiting, say, any web site, and I see a disgusting animated GIF that blinks a bad imitation of a link, and it tells me "if this link is blinking, you have won a shopping spree! Click to claim your prize", I am not just bored, or annoyed - I am offended and disgusted. I will never click that thing, in any way, ever. That is just advertising in poor taste; it is mistargeted at everyone. Same with the scripted "punch the monkey and win a prize" nonsense that is hopefully a quite dated reference by the time you read this - but it was all the rage during the .com mania. At the very least, most ads on TV (even the car ads sporting SUVs driving off-road and kicking up mud) are not so offensive to everyone's sensibilities. Say we ignore such cruft and look at somewhat more respectable ads. If I am viewing a site about computers, it's a fair bet that ads about computers might be a good idea, and ads about other topics not such a good idea. Web sites, increasingly, seem to be realizing this. But an advertisement asking me to buy a wireless camera to do who knows what with is not properly targeted. The web, far more than television or magazines, makes proper targeting of ads possible and easy. Ideally, advertisements should be a form of news. "Hey, this product is available." If I am on, say, www.storagereview.com and I see an advertisement for the Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP (a particularly tasty drive at the time of writing), that's excellent. I'll be pleased it's there. I might even click the danged thing, because I'm interested in buying that drive.

But a wrong assumption of the .com mania is that people should click banner advertisements, or that they will, or that tracking clicks is a good method to judge how effective an advertisement is. From the very instant I began to use the Internet and the web, I never clicked banner ads. I have always seen through their guise and their inner bogosity was revealed to me. Everyone and his uncle, it seems, took a while to realize this. I've heard that at times, 10% of people clicked banner advertisements. That was non-believable to me. Right now it's fallen to percentages I can believe - within epsilon of zero, if I recall