Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Ads, ads everywhere and why you need to be bored more often.
• Working out how to make money from Twitter has been a parlour game among the digerati for a long time now. Twitter started to square that circle with promoted tweets and has now gone further with the debut of what it snappily calls promoted trending topics. That's "adverts" for us mortals. These pop-up on profile pages accompanied by a yellow box announcing they are "promoted". The first is for Toy Story 3. TechCrunch runs the numbers:
"First, it's interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities."
• From the "This will not end well" department comes the story of David Perez who will spend the next week doing everything his Twitter followers tell him. Well, almost.
"There's only one catch to what Perez is calling David On Demand: it must be legal."
Despite this limit on the fun that can be had with this solo experiment in crowd-sourcing, the results are being streamed to a webpage set up to record the results. The experiment starts on 21 June.
• You would think that Iceland has had its fill of bad news given the dolorous state of its economy, but the nation has declared its willingness to become a haven for free speech and news organisations keen to ensure their voice is not suppressed. But its adoption of a modern media initiative is not all good news for hacks slaving over a hot keyboard.
"[I]n one major test case of cross-border online libel law, 'publication' was deemed to occur at the point of download -- meaning that serving a controversial page from Iceland won't keep you from getting sued in other countries. But if nothing else, it would probably prevent your servers from being forcibly shut down."
• The pundits are revolting. First Jeff Jarvis sent his iPad back, saying he didn't really need it. Now, Peter Bregman has done the same because it kept him too busy:
"So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming. But something -- more than just sleep, though that's critical too -- is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose. Boredom."
Who would choose to be bored? You should, according to Mr Bregman:
"My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital. They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They're the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen."
• Spam could be about to make the great leap from cyberspace to your living space. HP and Yahoo are teaming up to send targeted ads to that snazzy printer you have just hooked up the web. They know where you live.
"HP's ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user's home router, which means they will have an IP address. IP addresses can be used to identify an approximate area where the web-connected device is located, opening the potential for targeted advertisements based on location."
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Links in full
• MG Siegler | TechCrunch | Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad
• Don Reisinger | The Digital Home | Man's life to be controlled by Twitter users for one week
• Jonathan Stray | Nieman Journalism Lab | What will Iceland's new media laws mean for journalists?
• Peter Bregman | Harvard Business Review | Why I Returned My iPad
• Jeremy Kirk | Computerworld | HP partners with Yahoo for targeted ads
