I’m having a lot of “lemonade moments” (um, that means finding the good in a less than optimal situation, not wetting myself) this week going through a bunch of stuff from my mom’s basement (every technologist who goes on and on about “near-infinite, near-zero cost storage in the cloud” probably has a few boxes stored away at his or her parent’s, and this needs to be considered at some point, if not in this post.)

Lots of old computer magazines, circa 1983 or so, many of which are now available online (so yes, thank you, near-infinite storage) but somehow that made things worse and I ended up looking up more junk while disposing of what I had.  One gem was Blip, the Video Games Magazine, published by Marvel Comics in 1983.  Big fonts, lots of filler, 36 pages, $1.00 US/$1.25CA.  Lasted 7 issues before folding, but kind of fun, in retrospect.

Here’s a snippet from issue 4′s always popular “consoles are going to turn into computers” article:

Now, a quick-yet-lazy search on Google doesn’t show any evidence that Tony achieved his dream, but I like this entry because it doesn’t involve balancing your checkbook (remember those?) but still highlights the desperate need for early hobbyists to find something to fill the “but what can you do with it?” question that, let’s be honest, most of us had a hard time answering with something other than “games.”

In a lot of ways, I’m seeing social media of modern times approach computer rationalization of the early ’80s.  It’s passing, slowly, but there are still a horde of mid-stage adopters who are still looking for something to justify their use of Twitter, FourSquare, etc.  Just like those days, there’s a layering in progress that almost mirrors applications over hardware – without social networks, things like the mobile/social coupon thing we talked about the other week would just be coupons, for example.

And this isn’t a new observation by any means.  Still, I’d love to see an elevator pitch that really took this concept to heart and went along the lines of “we make it so people have an excuse to use X.”

Oh, and I’ve yet to see a running website that hits what Tony was after, exactly (please let me know if you’ve got one,) but I thought this part from the same Blip article was worthy of comment:

Seven years later, the scripts that would form the basis of IMDB were born.  No mention of Chris, but for some people, in the early days of the internet, IMDB was almost a justification for internet access in itself.

One more thought for the day on the NY Times while I wait for a data report to generate…

As I mentioned earlier, I had to log in to their site today to read an article.  It was free, no huge deal, except that it’d been so long since I’d had to do it that I didn’t have a BugMeNot extension installed so I opted to reset my legit account.

And why had it been so long? Or had it? It really isn’t something I’ve tracked that much – I remember the days when I’d read Slashdot and scroll through the comments for the no-login link to whatever article it was (and for all the griping about the login, there were a LOT of NY Times stories being linked up), but in recent times I don’t recall having to log in at all.  Maybe I had a really old cookie.  Whatever.

When we’re in a time where the AP is trying to block websites from spreading its content, it’s worth a look at some of the media companies’ motiviations before dismissing them outright.  In the NY Times article’s case, while I didn’t go to BugMeNot, I’ll admit that the first thing I did was Google the opening sentence of the article.

I was a bit surprised by what came back.

There were about 267 results (I put quotes around the search.)

The article was only a few hours old.

And I don’t think the NY Times were in them at all.

What was in there was a ton of Adsense blogs – sites with the same headline, same opening quote that’s (I assume) available through RSS, plus the link to the story. Oh, and a ton of ads around the page.

These sites (the majority, anyway; I didn’t cick through and examine several pages of each) exist for one reason only, and that’s to make money off of people like me who are searching for the original article.  Some of us are trying to avoid a login, and some of us are just trying to find the original article, whether it’s on the source site or not.

But you know what?  This isn’t a Big Media problem.  Most bloggers have had the same thing happen to them.  It just happens less often, since our content, uh, kinda sucks sometimes.

Big Traditional Print Media might be whining a bit about Google News killing their business, but that’s not what’s happening.

It’s Google Adsense.

Think about the growth of the big search engine indexes.  Remember when they used to brag about them and compete amongst themselves over whose was bigger?

Do you really think that the internet’s near-geometric growth in number of pages would be anywhere near the path it’s been tracking if it wasn’t for automated feed-generated web pages plastered with ads?

I think there’s tons of room for bloggers and other web publishers to reuse existing content in a way that brings traffic and authority to the authors, but let’s be clear on who the targets are before slamming down claims of theft and/or walling off big chunks of the internet like it’s 1995.

Tom from the office (our office, not The Office) sent me a link to a NYTimes article about hyperlocal sites.  Surprisingly, I had to log in to the site to read it, which I don’t remember having to do in a while.  More on that in another post.

I hadn’t been tracking this area in a while, mostly because 1) most of these efforts are for US cities, and 2) most of them suck, so it was a good chance to see where things were going at a high level.

Sadly, not much has changed, and it’s a bit unfair to say they suck, but the thing of it is that it’s hard enough to get an audience of dedicated early adopters for a given subject area, but adding geographic constraints to the problem makes it even harder.

An analyst named Greg Sterling has a good quote in the article that explains a lot of the core problem: “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences… Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”

And it’s not just advertising, content suffers the same issue.  At the moment, the people who want to read this kind of site are the exact same people who are working to feed it.

So let’s allow for the time machine to zip forward to a point where any given neighbourhood has a thousand voices and ten thousand readers (hey, will these numbers happen anywhere outside of a condo farm?) – what’s the difference going to be between something like this and the local community paper?  We have one in our neighbourhood, the area it covers keeps growing, and it’s biased as anything else you can imagine. The loudest voices are going to win here, just like anywhere else.

Here’s an upside for a Monday: yes, I think these things will all fail, at least in their current approach.  That said, I think a lot of great lessons are going to come out of it, a lot of new features and gizmos are going to spin off, and in the meantime, maybe I’ll find out what’s up with that pothole across the way.

If you haven’t heard of TinyURL yet, it’s one of the original URL shortening services that can take a really long URL and make it into a really short one.  The link goes to their server and redirects to the actual destination.  It’s handy for emailing long links which might get corrupted with word wraps, and I use it a lot when I post to Twitter to keep under the 140 character limit.

They’ve had this neat feature for a while where you can give your post a custom alias, which means, instead of http://tinyurl.com/d39dm you can have http://tinyurl.com/booger (I just typed those in the post editor, haven’t clicked on either, never will, totally made up examples, etc)

This morning I wanted to post a Tweet about a news story and I figured I’d give it a custom alias so followers would have a hint as to what it’s about.  For reasons I’ll get to in a second, I won’t go into what the story was (you can follow me to find it, I suppose), but the alias I’d chosen was already taken.  Since it was a pretty topical alias I typed it in to see if someone had found a better story.

Nope, it was porn.

That’s right, people are squatting on tinyURL aliases now.  Cheaper and faster than registering domain names, I guess, and they don’t expire.  I just wonder if that means that a lot of people are already typing in URLs on speculation to the service, or if it’s a trend that people on the edge have spotted.  Since the link was to porn (hence the lack of an example), and porn is generally a leader when if comes to technology, there might be something to this.

Just in case: http://tinyurl.com/jasondoucette

I did a quickie (and slightly cryptic) post a little while ago comparing old school comic book ads to Google Ads, but a post on Boing Boing about a man who bought a monkey via a comic ad got me to thinking some more.

No, I’m not about to go out and buy a monkey anytime soon, but I really think that Google’s advertising program is this generation’s version of the random comic ad, times a million – the barriers to entry are nearly nonexistent, the content can be equally ridiculous, and really, there’s only one tragic piece missing: years from now, how are we going to review this time in history?

Assuming some group out there is keeping track of a portion of the ads out there, which I doubt, there’s a whole new component of interactivity that’s missing.  I don’t just want to know that someone advertised an eBay affiliate link for African Slaves (OK, in that case I don’t really want to know at all), I want to know what keywords led to what ads which led to what pages.

I want an Internet Archive for advertising, really.  Who’s keeping track of the classic banners of days past?  If this is the era of advertising-supported content, how will that be reflected in our archives of this particular time?

Of course, I don’t know what the Archive’s future is either, as things get more and more AJAXy and data driven.  There’s less and less value that comes from scrapers these days as more and more content comes from embedded script and object tags.  It’s kind of a shame, but I don’t expect (or particularly want) “we can’t archive it” to be a design constraint on innovation moving forward.

In 20 years, will we get nostalgic for nostalgia?