I just ran across a new site called Viral Conversations. The basic idea is to serve as a brokerage between companies with products they want reviewed and bloggers who want to review them. Sony submits an offer for a blogger to review a camera, some bloggers submit applications to review the camera, Sony [...]
For a long time, the only free source of data about site traffic online has been the Alexa Top Sites list, but the data for the Alexa list is based on the very skewed sample of folks who run the Alexa toolbar, and who the heck runs the Alexa toolbar these days? When I’ve [...]
I’ve been reading up on the history of media and advertising lately, including a book by Stephen Fox on the history of advertising called Mirror Makers. Fox’s core argument is that advertising strategies are cyclical over time, varying between straightforward, plain text advertising that describes the price and value of the product to atmospheric [...]
We’ve started a blog for the Berkman Surveillance Project. I’ve been posting all of my surveillance stuff there, including the following stories:
Narus: Security through Surveillance
Best Western Data Breach as Shell Game
CALEA Status
Here’s an interview on google privacy issues I did last week for IT Business Edge.
Doc asks why opendns has broken the search from the address bar feature of his firefox. The problem is that the address bar fail over to google relies on the dns request failing, but opendns requests never fail. Instead, if an opendns server gets a request for a non-existent address, it display the [...]
So I’m sitting here at my excellent local Memphis honda repair shop getting Little Tokyo’s oil changed. In addition to being locally run, honest, and professional, the shop has wifi, so I can sit and work (or blog!) while getting my car fixed. The wifi wasn’t working today, so I asked the owner [...]
One of my guiding theories of the modern media / advertising landscape is that the extensive real time surveillance of consumers by online advertisers and content providers encourages the growth of content about digital cameras (the content about which is easily monetized) at the expense of hard news, especially international news about developing countries like [...]
I’ve been playing around with the new Google Insights for Search, which is targeted to advertisers but is terribly interesting for anyone interested in media issues. Here’s a comparison of searches for newspaper, blog, and magazine:
Worldwide
U.S.
Nigeria
Leaving aside the obvious qualifications about the limitations of this metric, the fact that blogs have become more popular [...]
FlyClear, the company that handles an express lane security clearance in some U.S. airports, recently lost control of a laptop that contained personal data used to verify the identity of subscribers. The company has repeatedly pointed out that no social security numbers or credit card numbers were included in the data as if that’s [...]
