Wal-Mart... WTF Is a Firefox?

Good 'ol WalMart... Wally-World... the crawling chaos of the western world... has entered the digital movie space to much hooplah.

Good for them, they take an idea thats several years old and say "me too".

Nevertheless, I'm sure it took a long time to work out the legal issues, the technical issues, design issues and all sorts of great stuff.

So, can someone tell me why they never even bothered to check their site in Mozilla Firefox?

Here's what it looks like in Firefox:


I've never been a huge fan of Walmart and it's gaffs like this that remind me why I never go there or shop on their site. Ever.

shoutout to Techcrunch for the heads' up.

Technorati Slaps 2000 Bloggers

Earlier, I wrote about the 2000 bloggers project. It was started by Tino Buntic who had an idea to connect the bloggers in a photo collage.

However, Technorati didnt seem to like the idea too much. According to David Utter, writer for WebProNews, Technorati views the 2000 blogger project as a "scheme" to manipulate blog popularity. Timo himself came out and said:

"I guess Technorati is upset with me. That doesn't feel good, now. Anyway, I got about 1700 on my collage. I don't even know if I should finish it. I'll take down the code to repost it."

While I liked the idea, the interactivity, the creativity of the project and I admire Timo for getting this started, I think what's happening here is Technorati ascribing "intent" in the project. In other words, just because it could be potentially viewed as a link farm or manipulation of the search results or technorati rankings, then it will be viewed as such. Technorati's hard line view on this practice is a little disappointing. It seems like they're throwing away the nature of the interactive social project because it's a potential manipulator.

The 2000 blogger project, while it did provide links to blogs, neither advertised itself as a way to capture links nor did it set up several image/ link collages and essentially limited itself to only 2000 blog participants. If this was a self perpetuating link farm, then I would have no problem with Technorati's stance. Unfortunately, it seems that the intent of the project was not enough to give sway to Technorati's staff who are closing it.

Oh well, links are like tools, they can be used to build and they can be used to destroy... they have the potential to do both. In this case, just because there was a potential to do bad things... they knocked it.

In-Game Ads Selectable by Users of Casual Games

Big Fish Games, with over 25 million unique visitors a month is planning on allowing their users to select which ads they want to see as they play their games.

Big Fish Games is a gaming site with hundreds of flash games oriented towards the casual gamer is owned by AWS Convergent Technologies. In order to maximize the revenue brought by the traffic and advertising click throughs are planning an opt-in system for advertising chosen by the people playing those games.

This is a smart move, not only do users select advertisements that they're interested in, and therefore more likely to convert upon, AWS/ Big Fish Games are getting valuable demographic and behavioral information from the users on the front end. Which will allow for more relevant and targeted advertisements.

According to MarketingVox, they've already secured Microsoft Live, Match.com, Western Union, Hoover and Walt Disney World as initial sponsors. This is not geared for the "hard core" or "nerd core" gamers, but the players who enjoy challenging puzzles and flash "twitch" games.

With this data, they can deliver contextual ads that enhance the experience of the user, maximize the conversion click throughs and allow the user to customize their experience, as personalization starts pervading through users' internet experience.

Most of the time when I mention in-game ads, I'm talking about PC or console games with billboards, or locations that represent real companies, or interactive objects like a bottle of Slurm that you can drink. The other kind of ad that is being looked at can be derived from your search and internet habits to deliver real time contextual ads into your game. As cleverly drawn from the excellent web-comic/ industry watcher site Penny Arcade. (Seriously, check them out, they're brilliant).

This kind of in-game advertising makes me a little nervous, not because it'll ruin the purity of dismembering zombies (an activity I heartily endorse), but because I am still not convinced that the companies engaged in the advertising will have the users' experience and best interests in mind.

Anyway, in-game ads are here, they're here to stay... lets just hope they do it right.

More on Evidence Based Managment

I love this cartoon, and as I go through Pfeffer and Suttons' book, there are parts of the book that remind me of this.

This cartoon has been used to entertain math geeks, critique pseudoscience like Intelligent Design, and brilliantly show that knowledge starts with data and ends with something useful (hopefully). But somewhere in the middle is the arduous task of analysis, being wrong, being frustrated, hard work, peer review and all of the un-sexy stuff that gets ignored.

It's kind of a small rant, but it's the "CSI-ification" of science or analysis... they get a clue, then some fancy camera shots and a high tech lab... chemicals and viola! They get the information they need to catch the bad guy.

The miracle is hard work... it's the analysis, it's the brainstorming of lots of smart people trying to figure it out. To call it a miracle is almost an insult... and that's why I love this cartoon