Brave New Media 2

I should say, first off, that I like paying my rent and, you know, eating. These are Good Things in my book. And since my paycheck comes from Big Corporate Media -- and specifically from online Big Corporate Media, and therefore from the ad revenue for online BCM -- I don't want to saw off the branch I'm sitting on by suggesting there shouldn't be any such ads.

But since my livelihood is, in fact, staked on this kind of advertising, I also have a stake in seeing these ads done right. To me, that means ads that don't unduly burden or confuse readers and that don't alter or influence content. I'd also like to think that the creatures from Advertising Land who sell these ads aren't deliberately swindling our advertisers, either -- meaning that ads that charge per click shouldn't be generating illegitimate clicks by deception or misdirection (a la The Bride of Clippy).

Embedded, in-text advertising seems to me to fail on every one of those points. Criticizing it isn't a matter of "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me," then, it's a matter of making sure that this feeding is sustainable and not left "in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anaesthetize the way that you feel," as it were.

When online BCM opts for the short-term revenue bump that these kinds of ads promise to provide, they're being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Annoying readers is not a good way to increase traffic over the long run. Undermining the credibility of the news they provide diminishes the only product news organizations have to offer. And bilking advertisers with borderline click-fraud doesn't seem likely to appeal to those advertisers in the long run either.

So there's that.

But there's another, separate reason that I find these in-text ads so infuriating.

Let me illustrate this with an example from today's paper, in the nutrition column, "Americans are suckers for weight-loss scams." After cautioning readers to be wary of diet fads and weight-loss schemes, the columnist suggests that they read more about this at the FTC's consumer protection Web site. Here's how that final paragraph appeared in the print edition of the column:

For tips on avoiding weight loss scams, visit the FTC's Web site at www.ftc.gov. Click on "consumer protection," then "consumer information." Then, select "diet, health & fitness."

That's a bit clumsy and long-winded, but in print, in non-hyper-text, referring readers to URLs is necessarily clumsy and long-winded. (It might have been easier to tell readers to "visit www.ftc.gov/bcp/menus/consumer/health.shtm," but the impulse to avoid longish URLs in print is a good one.)

One of the immensely frustrating things about the "New Media" sites of BCM is that you will see -- online -- paragraphs that look exactly like the one above from the print edition. You won't find this awkward transposition of non-hypertext as hypertext anywhere on the Web except for these BCM sites, where shovelware is used to take chunks of printed material and dump it unceremoniously into Web templates. Even the laziest blogger (and I know from lazy bloggers) would never post something like the following:

Atrios has a good comment on this. To read what he has to say, visit the Web log (or "blog") Eschaton at http://atrios.blogspot.com and then scroll down to the entry titled "Wheeeeeeeeee."

Yet exactly that sort of thing can be found, on a regular basis, on newspaper Web sites. It creates the impression that you've stumbled across a tourist struggling to speak the language with a slightly out-of-date phrasebook.

BCM are enamored of that phrase "New Media" when referring to online journalism, yet they have been bewilderingly slow to understand what's really new about it. Words and pictures, after all, are not new media. Video and animation and most of the other we-can-so-we-should bells and whistles these sites offer aren't really new kinds of media either. The Internet, they seem to think, provides a new way to broadcast these things, but broadcasting also is nothing new. Hypertext, though, that's new. Without hypertext, the Web might as well be just a big old gopher site with lots of .pdf and .mov files. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of how BCM seems to treat the Web.

Now, finally, we're seeing actual links on newspaper sites, yet even though these links appear in the news stories, as part of those news stories, they're not news links. They're ads. So in addition to all of the reasons listed above for why these ads are unwise, annoying and at best borderline ethical there's also this: In-text advertising creates a barrier to newspaper sites ever fully realizing the potential of hypertext links. Once such links become established as the domain of advertising, the presence of news links within stories can only add confusion.

For an example of this, look no further than the nutrition column linked above. The certified shovelware operator who dumped this column onto the Web is also, by day, a blogger and avid consumer of online news. As such, he found that long string of "go to ... and then click ... and then click" instructions unacceptable and replaced it with the following:

For tips on avoiding weight loss scams, visit the FTC's consumer protection Web site on Diet, Health & Fitness.

Slightly more elegant and Web-appropriate, but here's the problem: the column also contains multiple in-text advertising links. The word "health" links to an ad for Promise margarine. The words "consumer" and "money" link to this ad for Capital One. And the phrase "weight loss" links to a sponsored search results page (which, awkwardly, includes lots of links to exactly the kind of diet and weight-loss schemes that the columnist is warning against).

The in-text ad links have a slightly different appearance than the legitimate news-content link supplied by the columnist herself. The advertising links are underlined in green text. The news link is not underlined and it's in blue text.

This is what the distinction between news content and advertising has come down to: the difference between blue and green. I suppose this is what they mean by "yellow journalism."

Comments

[mike timonin]

Interesting tangent - my first reading of these posts comes from the Livejournal feed. LJ has recently added a "feature" whereby links in a post, when moused over, provide a preview of what you're going to see if you click on the post (at some minute fraction of the size - just barely too small to actually READ the content). Which would seem to take the whole issue of in-text advertising to a whole new annoying level - like Bride of Clippy Meets In-Text Advertising, or something.

[ckp]

Hey, they all say "Wheeeeeee".

[Jason Barr]

it's interesting, the double-edged sword that is hypertext... And, not entirely unlike the relationship between commercials and programs and product placements and even news magazine shows, the relationship between hypertext links and these in-text advertisements subverts the apparent division between advertising and related content... which is probably exactly what in-text advertisers want.

Not to mention the potential to dump ads for fad diets and such in the above-mentioned story about such schemes... just as the one search results page you mention.

The relation between news media and advertising has always been tenuous, with the potential to subvert the attempted objectivity of news, but this seems to take the whole thing to a new level. I have a lot of affinity for Chomsky and Herman's "propaganda model", but I don't know that it anticipates something like this. I wonder what the propaganda model for the hypertext era would look like...

[Dahne]

I will not buy this search results page, it is scratched.

[Stan Taylor]

Thanks, Fred. That's exactly the point I tried to make in my comment to the previous post. To see my comment, go to http://slacktivist.typepad.com and click on... Oh wait, I can link to my comment. Ah, the never-ceasing wonders of hypertext.

[Spongebob]

The dream of Open Hypermedia was that the links weren't embedded into the document. This had two effects, one of which you probably know about (but never consciously thought about) and the other was obvious to the researchers but not the general public

Firstly, it meant Open Hypermedia didn't happen, we got the World Wide Web instead. Scientists are gracious enough that this meant Tim BL got Visiting Professorships and Honorary degrees from all over, and was invited to be on the board of important companies and so on, rather than say, being assassinated by a hitman paid for out of Coffee subscriptions from every Computer Science department in the world. Why? Because the World Wide Web was much, much easier to use than Open Hypermedia systems had been, with the Web you just wrote text (anyone could do that) and put mysterious angle bracket codes around some of the text (you could pay your teenage daughter to do that for you).

Secondly, it would have meant that you decided which links you saw, rather than whoever wrote the text (or drew the pictures) that you're looking at. Most likely a lot of the time you'd voluntarily let the author decide some of the links, since they might have something they want to link to that you're actually interested in. But often you'd also want what are called "generic links". You might have seen a generic-link type feature in one of the major US newspaper web sites, I've forgotten which one, but when you select a phrase like "Senator Thompson" or " Julia Sawalha" it tries to tell you something relevant about them without the author of the page having to specifically author a link. Generic links are the Open Hypermedia world's alternative to looking everything up in Wikipedia. Every piece of text (say, "Hilary Clinton" or "Final game this season") would offer a range of possible destinations that were relevant to the context and to your personal preferences. On top of those, Open Hypermedia also promised "anotational links" which would mean that your friend could link a section of Fred's text and write "Fred's wrong here, I've met those guys and actually..." and you'd see it in the context of Fred's original post, unless you tired of that friend's ranting and removed them from your link database.

This is the idea that Vibrant and other advertisers are playing on with their hopelessly out-of-context advertisements. Of course in a real Open Hypermedia system it would only take two clicks for you to permanently disable Vibrant or any similar advertiser, and you'd have to opt in to see such links in the first place. But that's where all these ideas come from. The Web effectively just bought ease of use up front and paid with a longer time to ramp up to the full capabilities of a hypermedia system. But that's OK, at least my parents don't think I'm crazy any more for believing that the Internet would revolutionise our culture.

Actually it all starts more than sixty years ago, with a man named Vannevar Bush. It's amusing to think that many years before I was born, the wheels had already been set in motion to produce what we're calling today "New Media". Bush didn't have access to a digital computer (they had been invented, but no really practical ones had been constructed) so his invention doesn't rely on one and it would probably have been too clumsy to be useful. But once you have a digital computer and Bush's idea the modern web browser is mostly a matter of engineering.

[Bruce in South Florida]

My hovercraft is full of eels...

[Jen R]

Your use of Atrios as an example is ironic. I can recall seeing lots of links to Atrios that said, "Go to the homepage and scroll down the post titled 'Wheeeeeeeeee' because permalinks are bloggered again."

Not that your point isn't well-taken in general.

I always feel like those online newspapers that don't provide hyperlinks just don't want me to leave their site, which is annoying for a different reason.

[Stan Taylor]

Spongebob, I appreciate the history lesson (I mean that seriously), but when you say, This is the idea that Vibrant and other advertisers are playing on with their hopelessly out-of-context advertisements, I think you're giving said advertisers too much credit. In the general sense that this type of linking was already thought of, that might be true, but in the more specific sense, I think they're just looking to make a buck.

[Retrogrouch]

Dang. I remember Gopher. Bush 41 was president then...

[balt]

The problem here is actually caused by the artificial seperation between advertising and editorial (well, in combination with an attempt to gain commercial benefit in the first place).

Compare IntelliTXT with Fred's immediately prior post on Thanksgiving entertainment containing three hyperlinks to Amazon that are effectively the same thing as what IntelliTXT is trying to ideally accomplish -- but because Fred is a human contextualizing the hyperlinks and doesn't have to use (ineffective) technology to bridge an artificial divide between advertising and editorial content, it works more effectively and is less offensive. It is nonetheless exactly the same thing: a contextual link to an opportunity to buy something, with the sender getting a kickback from the seller (presumably -- I haven't analyzed the links to see if they would actually get Fred a kickback on sales, but I know the capacity exists and I certainly hope Fred is taking advantage of it).

[ohiolibrarian]

Atrios has a good comment on this. To read what he has to say, visit the Web log (or "blog") Eschaton at http://atrios.blogspot.com and then scroll down to the entry titled "Wheeeeeeeeee."

Given the many people who link to the site rather than the comment, I could wish that they would tell me what comment they are referencing!

Just wondering how people who have visual disabilities differentiate between the blue and green links. Web standards for ADA usually discourage colors in the same range like that.

[The Navigator]

On the topic of truth in advertising, there was an utterly fascinating documentary that came out in 2006 or so, or at least that's when I saw it in a film festival, called "Czech Dream," or at least that's how they translated it. It's about how two guys used the power of advertising to fool the entire Czech Republic. A great movie. I don't know if it's been released here, but I recommend you hunt it down if possible.

[The Navigator]

Czech Dream is available on Netflix, I just checked. And you can get it through Amazon, I believe.

[Alexis]

Now if only we could, say, link to a movie on Netflix so I wouldn't have to do the hard work of going there myself, searching for the movie, logging in, and adding it to my queue... :-)

FWIW, sidebar ads for X tend to turn up for any article about anti-X (just like links to X turn up in the in-text, basically because there's no simple way to determine if the article is pro- or anti-X. Though if I were Google I'd be working on that problem right now, Not so that the people who bought ads would feel that their ads were consistent with their editorial message, but so that I stopped serving ads that people won't click on because they're not relevant.

[Michele]

My favorite movie dealing with truth in advertising is "Crazy People" with Darryl Hannah and Dudley Moore.

Sony - because Caucasians are just too damn big!

[hagsrus]

Generic links and other stuff: If you have Firefox and the Autocopy add-on, just highlight, click right and choose search from the context menu.

Autocopy is one of my top favorites, sending anything you highlight to the clipboard without needing an additional "copy" instruction. You can also highlight a URL and ask for it to open in a new tab.

Its main drawback is remembering that it doesn't work outside Firefox.

[Spongebob]

hagsrus, autocopy is simulating a feature normally found in the X Window System (though not mandated by it) called the "PRIMARY selection". There's a similar attempt to clone this feature in mIRC*

Because X is intended to provide mechanism rather than policy, it can't just have a "clipboard" like most popular windowing systems. Instead it provides an unlimited number of "selections" and then mere convention says that one of them is called CLIPBOARD (which contains the last thing you Copied or Cut) one is called PRIMARY (it contains the last thing you selected, e.g. by dragging your mouse over a region with no explicit Copy action needed) and one is SECONDARY (which we won't worry about here). Since this is merely a convention, applications aren't forced to obey it, but when they do it's very useful.

It is also conventional in X to "paste" the PRIMARY (not CLIPBOARD) selection when someone clicks the middle mouse button in an entry widget. Netscape, and subsequently most other web browsers available for systems that use the X Window System, added a feature where if you middle click on something that's not an entry widget, and PRIMARY contains something that's interpretable as a URL, it will send the browser to that URL.

Unlike autocopy, X maintains the distinction between PRIMARY "stuff I happened to select" and CLIPBOARD "things I deliberately copied to a clipboard". This makes it much less dangerous, since idly selecting some text (a bad habit some people including me have) will never remove the important paragraph you copied into the clipboard 10 minutes ago. All of this adds to the reasons why the Unix administrator in your IT department looks slightly puzzled and annoyed when he tries to use your Windows PC for 5 minutes :)

* The popular X application X-Chat clones this mIRC feature even though in X it's completely inappropriate. As a result the X-Chat developers will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

[inge]

mike timonin: I hate that feature with the heat of a thousand suns. I cannot disable it on my work machine, and beyond being sh** ugly and completely useless, blotting out what I actually want to see and making it impossible to determine the worth of a link by looking at the URL, it makes NSFW pages pop up on a clumsy mouse movement. Rabid attack cows of Clippy's grandma, that's what it is.

[Emily]

There's actually a news site that startled me with in-text ads a couple of weeks ago (Turkish Daily News) - I clicked a word thinking, "Oh, good, I don't know much about this, I'll see if there's a related article" and ended up at a tangentially related commercial website. Really frustrating, when you think about how much opportunity the newspaper could have to increase traffic on the site and loyalty to the source with links to more information and analysis, and they're wasting it on ads that readers will never click again after the first mistake.

[Tangurena]

My browsing experience is a lot better now that I've turned off flash. And Bride of Clippy seems to be inoperative with flash turned off.

[Liz]

I think someone at BusinessWeek might have read your post, Fred.