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"advertising" entries
Software Psychology, Virus ID, Mobile Ads, and Complex Coupling
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Psychology of Software Architecture — a wonderful piece of writing, but this stood out: It comes down to behavioral economics and game theory. The license we choose modifies the economics of those who use our work.
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Single Blood Test to ID Every Virus You’ve Ever Had — As Elledge notes, “in this paper alone we identified more antibody/peptide interactions to viral proteins than had been identified in the previous history of all viral exploration.”
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Internet Users Increasingly Blocking Ads, Including on Mobiles (The Economist) — mobile networks working on ad blockers for their customers, If lots of mobile subscribers did switch it on, it would give European carriers what they have long sought: some way of charging giant American online firms for the strain those firms put on their mobile networks. Google and Facebook, say, might have to pay the likes of Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica to get on to their whitelists.
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Connasence (Wikipedia) — a taxonomy of (systems) coupling. Two components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. (Via Ben Gracewood.)
Design Fiction, 3D License, Web Funding, and API Magic
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Matt Jones: Practical Design Fiction (Vimeo) — the log scale of experience! Fantastic hour-long recap of the BERG thinking that he’s continued at the Google Creative Lab in NYC. (via Matt Jones)
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3dPL — public license for 3d objects. (via BoingBoing)
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Google Contributor — when the web’s biggest advertiser tries alternative ways to fund web content, I’m interested.
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Templar — an HTTP proxy that provides advanced features to help you make better use of and tame HTTP APIs. Timeouts, caching, metrics, request collapsing, …
Tab Tool, Ad Manifesto, Cultural Heritage, and Software Sustainability
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tab — command-line tool for doing heavy lifting with tab-separated files.
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Acceptable Ads — manifesto from the makers of AdBlock Plus. (via Monday Note)
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Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Matt Webb) — Matt points to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and comments: When the aliens land and set up shop and they’re like, “Guys, so what have you got?” And we’re all… “Uh, lasers? We’ll trade you lasers for a starship drive.” And the aliens will be: “Nope, what else?” Then we’ll say: “Tsiattista poetic duelling. Turkish coffee. Jazz.” Bingo. Kudos to UNESCO for prepping our inventory ahead of time.
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Apache (and Other Foundations) Considered Useful (Chris Aniszczyk) — have over a decade of experience being built for the sole purpose of allowing independent open source communities to flourish with fair governance models […] This is important because the incentives between individuals small companies, large companies, heavily funded companies and even academics are different and need to be accounted for in a fair open source governance structure. Sustainability of software commons is an unsolved problem, but foundations make it tractable.
Click to Captcha, Managing Hackers, Easy Ordering, and Inside Ad Auctions
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One Click Captcha (Wired) — Google’s new Captcha tech is just a checkbox: “I am not a robot”. Instead of depending upon the traditional distorted word test, Google’s “reCaptcha” examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.
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The Responsive Enterprise: Embracing the Hacker Way (ACM) — Letting developers wander around without clear goals in the vastness of the software universe of all computable functions is one of the major reasons why projects fail, not because of lack of process or planning. I like all of this, although at times it can be a little like what I imagine it would be like if Cory Doctorow wrote a management textbook. (via Greg Linden)
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Pizza Hut Tests Ordering via Eye-Tracking — The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza, from one of 4,896 combinations, based on which toppings they looked at longest.
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How Browsers Get to Know You in Milliseconds (Andy Oram) — breaks down info exchange, data exchange, timing, even business relationships for ad auctions. Augment understanding of the user from third-party data (10 milliseconds). These third parties are the companies that accumulate information about our purchasing habits. The time allowed for them to return data is so short that they often can’t spare time for network transmission, and instead co-locate at the AppNexus server site. In fact, according to Magnusson, the founders of AppNexus created a cloud server before opening their exchange.
Tracking Awareness, Simple GUIs, Service Design, and Pull-Based Development
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Floodwatch — a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual.
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slfsrv — create simple, cross-platform GUI applications, or wrap GUIs around command-line applications, using HTML/JS/CSS and your own browser.
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Service Design Toolkit downloads — posters and templates for workshops, posters, and exercises.
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Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Integrator’s Perspective (PDF) — Our key findings are that integrators struggle to maintain the quality of their projects and have difficulties with prioritizing contributions that are to be merged. To which every open-source project maintainer says, “no shit Sherlock” and “thank god it’s not just me” simultaneously.
Mesa Database, Thumbstoppers, Impressive Research, and Microsoft Development
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Mesa: Geo-Replicated, Near Real-Time, Scalable Data Warehousing (PDF) — paper by Googlers on the database holding G’s ad data. Trillions of rows, petabytes of data, point queries with 99th percentile latency in the hundreds of milliseconds and overall query throughput of trillions of rows fetched per day, continuous updates on the order of millions of rows updated per second, strong consistency and repeatable query results even if a query involves multiple datacenters, and no SPOF. (via Greg Linden)
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Thumbstopping (Salon) — The prime goal of a Facebook ad campaign is to create an ad “so compelling that it would get people to stop scrolling through their news feeds,” reports the Times. This is known, in Facebook land, as a “thumbstopper.” And thus, the great promise of the digitial revolution is realized: The best minds of our generation are obsessed with manipulating the movement of your thumb on a smartphone touch-screen.
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om3d — pose a model based on its occurrence in a photo, then update the photo after rotating and re-rendering the model. Research is doing some sweet things these days—this comes hot on the heels of recovering sounds from high-speed video of things like chip bags.
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Microsoft’s Development Practices (Ars Technica) — they get the devops religion but call it “combined engineering”. They get the idea of shared code bases, but call it “open source”. At least when they got the agile religion, they called it that. Check out the horror story of where they started: a two-year development process in which only about four months would be spent writing new code. Twice as long would be spent fixing that code. MSFT’s waterfall was the equivalent of American football, where there’s 11 minutes of actual play in the average 3h 12m game.
Mobile Hacks, Advertising Returns, Solid Writeup, and Predicted Future
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Researchers Find and Decode the Spy Tools Governments Use to Hijack Phones (Wired) — I’m fascinated to learn there’s an Italian company making (and selling) the mobile phone rootkits that governments use.
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On the Near Impossibility of Measuring the Returns on Advertising (PDF) — Statistical evidence from the randomized trials is very weak because the individual-level sales are incredibly volatile relative to the per capita cost of a campaign—a “small” impact on a noisy dependent variable can generate positive returns. (via Slate)
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Reflections on Solid Conference — recap of the conference, great for those of us who couldn’t make it. “Software is eating the world…. Hardware gives it teeth.” – Renee DiResta
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Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (1962) — [When] computers acquire the necessary capabilities…speeded-up data processing and interpretation will be necessary if professional services are to be rendered with any adequacy. Once the computers are in operation, the need for additional professional people may be only moderate […] There will be a small, almost separate, society of people in rapport with the advanced computers. These cyberneticians will have established a relationship with their machines that cannot be shared with the average man any more than the average man today can understand the problems of molecular biology, nuclear physics, or neuropsychiatry. Indeed, many scholars will not have the capacity to share their knowledge or feeling about this new man-machine relationship. Those with the talent for the work probably will have to develop it from childhood and will be trained as intensively as the classical ballerina. (via Simon Wardley)
Local Clusters, Pancoopticon, Indie Oversupply, and Open Source PDF
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Ferry — helps you create big data clusters on your local machine. Define your big data stack using YAML and share your application with Dockerfiles. Ferry supports Hadoop, Cassandra, Spark, GlusterFS, and Open MPI.
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What Google Told SEC — For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities. The only thing they make that people want to buy is the ad space around what you’re actually trying to do.
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The Indie Bubble is Popping (Jeff Vogel) — gamers’ budgets and the number of hours in the day to play games are not increasing at the rate at which the number of games on the market is increasing.
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pdfium — Chrome’s PDF engine, open source.
Ouroborosification, Kid Curricula, Geeky Furniture, and Data Leakage
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How In-App Purchases Has Destroyed the Games Industry — fantastic before-and-after of a game, showing how it’s hollowed out for in-app-purchase upsell. the problem is that all the future generations of gamers are going to experience this as the default. They are going to grow up in a world, in which people actually think this is what gaming is like. That social engineering and scamming people is an acceptable way of doing business.
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Making Makers — kid-tested curricula for kids learning to code, to 3D print, stop motion animation, and more. (via BoingBoing)
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555 Footstool in the Wild — awesome furniture in the shape of the ever-popular timing chip.
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What a Brand Knows About You When You Log In With Facebook (Twitter) — good lord. (via BoingBoing)
Mobile Libraries, Python Idioms, Graphics Book, and Declining Returns on Aging Link Bait
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Bolts — Facebook’s library of small, low-level utility classes in iOS and Android.
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Python Idioms (PDF) — useful cheatsheet.
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Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book — Markdown source in github. Notable for elegance and instructive for those learning to optimise. Coder soul food.
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About Link Bait (Anil Dash) — excellent consideration of Upworthy’s distinctive click-provoking headlines, but my eye was caught by we often don’t sound like 2012 Upworthy anymore. Because those tricks are starting to dilute click rates. from Upworthy’s editor-at-large. Attention is a scarce resource, and our brains are very good at filtering.