Saturday, December 09, 2006

RIP: Pre-roll ads

Without Fred’s pedigree, I’ve been pleading in the blog wilderness for online video services to use only click-to-play ads, and banish forever pre-roll ads. Today Fred predicts it:

Pre-roll ads are going the way of popups and other intrusive ads. They won’t be around in a couple years. And the online video services that use them to monetize their audience won’t be around either.

Because the thing you have to understand about digital media is its pervasive and abundant. There is always somewhere else to get the same thing. Digital is write once, read everywhere. Digital media is like a virus. It spreads like crazy.

So if you want to build a business around digital media, you have to be the best place to view/consume the media. Being the only place to see it is a naive strategy that won’t work. You have to make digital media easy to find, easy to watch/listen/view, easy to comment/tag/share, and easy to replicate/reblog/republish.

That’s the way two way media works. If you don’t understand/accept that, get out of the business because you’ll be out of it sooner or later.

He’s ok with post-rolls. Me too. He says mid-rolls may have a chance. I hope not. More from Online Media Daily.

LATER: Fred’s no more optimistic about the network TV collaboration to come up with a YouTube rival.

Social conservatives discover Romney’s gay rights record

So finally they notice:

Gov. Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican who has built a presidential campaign on a broad appeal for conservative support, is drawing sharply increased criticism from conservative activists for his advocacy of gay rights in a 1994 letter.

Mr. Romney’s standing among conservatives is being hurt by a letter he sent to the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts saying that he would be a stronger advocate for gay rights than Senator Edward M. Kennedy, his opponent in a Senate race, in a position that stands in contrast to his current role as a champion of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

“We must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern,” Mr. Romney wrote in a detailed plea for the support of the club, a gay Republican organization.

The circulation of the letter by gay rights groups in recent weeks has set off a storm of outrage among social conservatives, and by Friday was looming as a serious complication to Mr. Romney’s hopes. [...]

“This is quite disturbing,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who had praised Mr. Romney as a champion of traditional values at the group’s conference in late September. “This type of information is going to create a lot of problems for Governor Romney. He is going to have a hard time overcoming this.”

Paul Weyrich, a founder of the modern conservative movement, said: “Unless he comes out with an abject repudiation of this, I think it makes him out to be a hypocrite. And if he totally repudiates this, you have to ask, on what grounds?”

I love Sears

There are no Sears stores in Manhattan. I lived there for nearly 30 years without one; and never missed it (though I did once make a trip to Newport Centre - and never returned).

Here I love Sears, even though I have to drive an hour to Macon to find one. Our local K-Mart has yet to make the switch to a Sears Grand. I’m still hoping.

I like Craftsman and Kenmore and Lands End and today found yet another reason to love Sears. No it’s not the out-of-stock George W. Bush Elite Force Aviator 12” action figure.

It’s that Sears is one of only 80 national brands to advertise on the LGBT cable channel Logo. What’s more, the American Family Association is upset about it:

In an email alert to AFA members chairman Donald E. Wildmon says “Sears advertising is financing LOGO’s push to legalize homosexual marriage in addition to promoting the homosexual lifestyle.”

Wildmon says Sears ads will appear on shows like “Sex 2K Drag Kings,” “The Gayest and Greatest of 2006,” and “Transgeneration.”

He is urging members of the conservative Christian group to email Sears asking the retailer to cancel their advertising on LOGO and to “call your local Sears store and ask why Sears is supporting the homosexual network with its advertising.”

Let’s all watch for the boycott announcement together now shall we?

Ubuntu for non-geeks

I just have to find the time to rebuild my home-office system with Ubuntu Linux. Until them, I’m all talk. But Cory’s already done it, and he urges all of us to take the plunge:

GNU/Linux is a many-headed beast. Remember that free software gets written when a programmer has an itch to scratch. Sometimes a group of geeks will get fed up with a clunky way of installing software, or editing a text file, or configuring your WiFi, and just hack up an entirely new way of doing it. Much of the time, the new way is better, or at least not worse, and that’s great.

But this also means that there are sixty-leven ways of doing anything, from renaming your hard drive to setting your network up. And when you find a cool tool or the right fix online, half the time it seems to rely on you knowing how to do something that you haven’t encountered yet.

Moreover, the essential Unix philosophy is do nothing until your owner tells you to—plugging in new hardware doesn’t necessarily trigger a “helpful” dialog box offering to predict what you intend to do with your widget and make it so. This has its good points, but if you don’t know how to get a drive mounted already, it can be a little bewildering, not to mention frustrating. Ubuntu does a pretty good job with some hardware, but it’s not consistent with my expectations after a lifetime of MacOS computing.

Enter Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks. It reads like one of David Pogue’s excellent Missing Manual books—a fast, crystal-clear topical tour of the amazing collective accomplishment embodied in Ubuntu. I learned something new in every chapter, and ended up with a computer that did more of what I wanted it to do, faster.

This book should come with every Ubuntu Live CD—it’s just the documentation I needed to take some of the mystery out of my machine.

Define illegal pose

CNet’s report on the McCain “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act” requiring website to report illegal images, linked to another story about an Alabama man indicted as a child pornographer for photos of fully clothed teens:

In a federal indictment announced this week, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Pierson, 43, of being a child pornographer--even though even prosecutors acknowledge there’s no evidence he has ever taken a single photograph of an unclothed minor.

Rather, they argue, his models struck poses that were illegally provocative. “The images charged are not legitimate child modeling, but rather lascivious poses one would expect to see in an adult magazine,” Alice Martin, U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama, said in a statement.

So what’s a lascivious pose?

In a 1986 case called U.S. v. Dost, a federal judge suggested a six-step method to evaluate the legality of images. Here’s an excerpt from the opinion:

1. Whether the focal point of the visual depiction is on the child’s genitalia or pubic area.
2. Whether the setting of the visual depiction is sexually suggestive.
3. Whether the child is depicted in an unnatural pose, or in inappropriate attire, considering the age of the child.
4. Whether the child is fully or partially clothed, or nude.
5. Whether the visual depiction suggests sexual coyness or a willingness to engage in sexual activity.
6. Whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer. [...]

That leaves judges and juries faced with the difficult task of making distinctions between lawful and unlawful camera angles and facial expressions--an exercise that proves to be impossible to do without running afoul of the First Amendment.

“How do we distinguish pictures like these (on child modeling sites) from the everyday photos that our culture tolerates and even prizes?” said Adler, the NYU law professor. “For instance, who’s modeling in Vogue? A lot of those people are 15 and in scantily clad or suggestive photos.”

McCain bill to require Web sites to remove sex offender profiles

CNet:

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders. [...]

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain’s proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme--and even stiffer penalties--on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

“This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts,” said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.