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 […]
Category Archives: google
Digital Cameras v. Nigeria
12-Aug-08I’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 […]
Google Adwords Category Exclusion
24-Jun-08Google recently added category exclusion to its adwords system, allowing advertisers to choose not to support content that deals with topics such as “death & tragedy” and “military & international conflict”. The new category exclusion feature allows an advertiser exclude from its content network any pages that belong to a specified set of topics or […]
Two Spectacles
28-Mar-08I’ve been pondering how the concept of spectacle fits in with surveillance. In particular, I’ve been bouncing around two different concepts of the spectacle, one by Michel Foucault and the other by Scott Bukatman. Here’s an execution spectacle in Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: ‘Finally, he was quartered,’ recounts the Gazette d’Amsterdam of 1 April […]
Google Privacy Videos
06-Mar-08I recently ran across a series of videos produced by Google to explain the data collection of its search engine. Ms. Oyhe, an attractive, professional, and terribly reassuring support engineer explains what sorts of data Google collects and, implicitly, why users should not be overly concerned about the data collection: To improve out search results […]