I guess my larger concern is not so much all the places where it won’t work. My concern is all the places where it will. Because when it does show the slightest chance of working, it’ll suddenly appear everywhere. And we’ll be inundated.

By analogy: High fructose corn syrup was shown to work for sweetening food. And now it’s everywhere. Not only is it in our soft drinks, but also in most of the bread that you get from your average grocery store, most of the ice cream, etc. You just can’t escape it. Even though nutritionally it’s very poor. It works well at giving people that sweet taste, and it’s cheap, so it has taken over.

And that’s what I’m concerned about. I look at advertising the same way. It works, just like corn syrup works. But at the end of the day, when it becomes ubiquitous, I question the sort of society that we’re creating.

Do you mean Rosenblatt personally is one of the good ones, or that Google itself is one of the good ones?

I’m sure Rosenblatt is a great guy on a personal level. But there are some of us who believe that wrapping everything with advertising does take the value out of premium content. Imagine going to the movie theatre and having a Google sidebar with a continually-refreshing relevant set of ads on the right hand side of the screen, throughout the whole movie. “Oh, it’s ok, because it’s separate from the organic movie content,” Google would say. Ha. Right.

As a “user”, this is where it feels like our society is heading. And I don’t see the value.

I think you wrote a while back (can’t remember exactly where right now – might not matter, either) that “we’re all publishers now”. In this context, we all become search engines, we all become providers of information. Even goods and services themselves to some degree contain information.

So to follow up on this, I suggest delving deeper into sich questions as “what is a publisher?”, “what is an advertiser?”, “what is a product?, service?, etc.?”.

I just posted a new blog post (kind of in response to what I heard being tweeted @iab / #iabnet: http://gaggle.info/post/152/how-to-measure-language ), but I feel much more ground breaking was an earlier post of mine (titled “On the Web, It’s Freedom 2, Publishing 0″: http://gaggle.info/post/141/on-the-web-its-freedom-2-publishing-0 ). The newer post is more about keyword search, the older post is more about traditional/print vs. online publishing — but both of the two are, of course, closely related (what you often refer to as the “command line” and/or “search box”).

BTW: Also interested to hear more about your Q&A @SMX!

nmw

We need more competition in this space for the little guys too. The YPN (yahoo’s publisher network) sucks. AdSense is a monopoly and the alternatives; AdBrite, etc… Nothing to get excited about. Waste of time for the most part.

Lets see what the rest of 2009 brings in this space…

Mike