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Some time ago, I was chatting with a flatmate, who's doing art, about the movie Minority Report. I didn't like the story at all, but what my friend was fascinated about (and actually attracted my attention to, since I had not noticed it) was the technical ideas proposed in the movie: When people passing the advertisement boards, the sensors identified them by scanning their eyes, and changing the advertisement displayed to one that was of the visitor's interest (presumably a database of everybody's information was available, typical sci-fi things). He explained me that this idea has inspired advertisers to find a way to advertise selectively depending on personal interests. It may be still sci-fi in bus-stop ads, but in the silico-based world, this is being done for ages: Many of the popups we get while surfing, or the offers we see when we login in an online store we're already registered with, are automatically "selected" specially for us, based on what we have bought before, the region we live in (by detecting the IP address we use) or such. Not very recently, Google has run an advertising system for weblogs and similar dynamic pages, by which it will select the subject of the ad based on the key terms people use in their website. They hope this will increase the ads targeting the right visitors. I used to think that bombarding people with ads will push them away from paying attention to them, but surveys show otherwise. (PS: I checked my typos with Blogger's spellchecker, neither "Google" nor "weblog" is in their dictionary. Odd isn't it) Posted @ 2/02/2004 09:19:00 AM ______________________________________________
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