Filed under: Internet, Blogging
When ISPs attack - with advertising
Over the weekend there's been a pretty big flap over whether some A-list bloggers have violated the public's trust by participating in an advertising campaign. For the most part, nobody's claiming those bloggers has actually been bought off, but there is a question of whether bloggers should be interacting directly with their advertisers or maintaining the same type of wall between editorial and advertising content that mainstream journalists have.Wherever you fall on the issue, it's kind of amusing to see that TechCrunch, one of the blogs caught up in the kerfuffle (and a quality unbiased source of Web 2.0 news), is reporting on another questionable advertising practice: ISP placed banner ads.
Apparently Texas based ISP Redmoon has rolled out software that places banner ads on pretty much every web page its customers visit. At first, it looks like there's a major new advertiser sponsoring every site on the web. But it turns out that it's just Redmoon making a buck off of other people's content.
It's one thing if you're a company offering free internet service supported by advertising. But Redmoon is already charging customers for internet access. It looks like this may just be the tip of the iceberg. Redmoon is using technology provided by NebuAd to place the ads, which refers to ISP advertising as an "untapped revenue source."
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
