Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Episode 44: Total Annihilation
Play Now!What happens when warring parties place full efforts on winning their personal battles, but not a lot of attention avoiding pissing off a third party? Or worse, takes advantage of the third party, treating them as the prize to be won? Expect the title of Episode 44: Total Annihilation. The warring titans will find their battlefield prize turning against all of them, with collateral damage rampant and a change to the entire conflict.Largely because this phase of battle through technology is new and emergent, this episode focuses on articles rather than books. We hear me reading: Ben Thompson's article Why Web Pages Suck from his blog "Stratechery"; Nilay Patel's Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web from The Verge; John Gruber's Safari Content Blocker imore from Daring Fireball; and Marco Arment's The Ethics of Modern Web Ad-Blocking.Today's music is exclusively from the Cave Dog game from which I gleaned the title to today's episode. Music written by Jeremy Soule. (I miss that game.) I introduce the show with Jan Wong backed by KMFDM.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
greetings ad attacker, loving the show. i haven't listened to this episode yet but wanted to drop a thought in here after reading Nilay Patel's article linked above. I was struck by this line:
ReplyDelete"Those huge chunks — the ads! — are almost certainly the part you don't want. What you want is the content, hot sticky content, snaking its way around your body and mainlining itself directly into your brain."
by my reckoning, the content itself is dead. it has been thoroughly co-opted into the advertising machine. SEO techniques are now ubiquitous among content providers. One technique that slides by unnoticed until you know about it is keyword stuffing - remember when web pages used to have a single descriptive name, like article1.html ? now they are stuffed with as many words as possible. take a look at the page name for Nilay's article:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9338963/welcome-to-hell-apple-vs-google-vs-facebook-and-the-slow-death-of-the-web
a bit verbose for a page name right? this is driven by the way google crawls the net and judges pages based on their relevance. The word stuffing doesn't end there. take a look at the way the article is broken up into headers that repeat things in the text. that's not to highlight key points for the reader, those headings are there to stuff words for the google webcrawler. the links in the page will reliably contain keywords that the author or publisher knows will drive traffic, and they stuff them in there wherever they can, often to the point of blatant repetition. this article masks it pretty well, but here's a glaring example from the text:
"iOS 9 came out yesterday (in fits and starts) and with it, support for content blockers in iOS 9."
how many times can we say iOS 9 in one sentence? as many as possible, since it's a trending term and will get the attention of google's crawler. google also ranks the page based on relevant links, so this paragraph contains 3 - and they all point back to verge articles.
If we take away the long page title, take away the repetitive headers, take away the keywords stuffed into every corner of the page, the content practically disappears. The author states that people want content, which is true, but advertising has made the bulk of the content on the web this way - repetitive, self referential and devoid of information. To me, that is not content at all, it is words strategically pissed onto a page to make sure that the ad agency (google) knows that people will find this page and click on ads. The "Content" itself has become the ad!
Nilay suggests that his article is about the slow death of the web. I contend that it has been shambling along, dead as a puppet on marionette strings held by a couple of big ad providers for at least 5 years.
Hey There, Static!
DeleteJim here, correcting an error from darned near four years ago. BS, the web host for the show notes, marked this as "spam" and shoved it into a folder I didn't know existed. Your comment is hardly spam, and deserves to shine here.
Hope you're still listening!
—Jim
hi ad attacker,
ReplyDeleteglad you got my comment, even if it didn't get posted here. :) great episode!