We are stepping into a new golden age but when we get there we'll discover that the gold we seek is worthless.
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The Golden Age of botany
(submitted by
dave.)
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As a professional web designer, I have often been asked how to make money from the internet. There are primarily two charging models, but in my opinion both of them are flawed.
As a general rule pay per view sites find it hard to attract hits. The obvious exceptions to this are porn and financial services sites.
Banner ads are a good source of revenue for big hit sites now and are an easier sell because the industry understands the idea, but they are easily ignored (and this will affect clickthru rates directly). Filters like webfree are great: They save me download times (about 20-40k less from an altavista search is significant for me at home with a 28.8 modem). I have a direct incentive to use it as a) it works so I almost never see ads and thus have no idea what I'm missing, and b) it saves me time and money.
So banner ads will go west I'm afraid as they become susceptible to ad virii (a small virus colony which thrives on Apple logos and alters them to Microsoft or changes Pepsi to Coke, Nike to Reebok etc...) and deliberate ad filters (but we've got to censor the smut to protect our kiddies! same tech).
Of course it is the ad industry broadly who will drive this bus as they seek to localise their ads. Fox do it now with their cable sports. The ads I see here are put in on top of whatever ads are on the field in a prenegotiated localisation program. As more and more of what we perceive in our day to day life becomes digital, the sophistication of ads has to evolve.
Advertising is a means of communicating to your clients. In a broadcasting world it was the means pretty much. An us and them arrangement. Building a good website is about communicating with your clients and your suppliers in a networked manner and will supplant the role of advertising as more and more sites like my.yahoo.com and www.opensesame.com develop sophisticated ways of keeping you coming back for more and by directly integrating you with their network.
It pleases me incredibly to see work being eradicated, money becoming worthless and marketing becoming automatically focused on what you like. We are developing a very crafty set of rose coloured lenses. No-one need ever experience anything they don't want to. Life++.
It strikes me as odd that people look at the net like it's somehow there for them. It's like saying that you exist so your kidney has something to do. We exist in a symbiosis with our technology and have become a greater whole as a result. Soon however this new playground for informational life will transcend us as the most intelligent thing(s) on the planet. As more sites integrate themselves with each other and pull in people to stir the mix and provide spontaneous creativity, the more high level analysis engines (ie search engines at the moment are primitive versions of this, log files an even more primitive example) and META information begins to gather based on an interconnected soup of other META information, the whole damn lot has to develop consciousness. Look at the character of a listserver, usenet or LOUD.
So where does that leave us? There is only so long we can cut out the middle man. Already the internet has demonstrated that unless you have to move atoms about, or create something new, it's pretty hard to charge for it. As we get better at automation, and software agents can move atoms about (http://www.foresight.org/), reprogram themselves to better suit their current informational environment (http://www.geneticprogramming.com/) and rebuild themselves to adapt to the problem at hand, we won't be able to charge for anything. It is the height of human arrogance to assume we are the be all and end all of the evolutionary process. When the new golden age arrives, it will be worthless. The network is alive and one day we will understand that. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday and for the rest of our lives.
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Created on Fri, 5 Sep 1997 and last modified on Mon, 3 Nov 1997.
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