The Adblocker plug-in, writes Noam Cohen in today's New York Times, has the potential to be an "extreme menace to the online-advertising business model.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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kiba
4 years 36 weeks 6 days 8 hours ago
Who care? It is going to affect
Who care?
It is going to affect my revenue if they become popular, but I don't see the need to whine and complain about the people destroying a business model. These people below who are whining about adsblock killing the golden goose.
As far as I am concerned, I need to find a new business model and fast.
The customers are alway right!
If you want to survive, adapt to the cold harsh reality of the Free market.
scarpent
4 years 36 weeks 5 days 6 hours ago
Interesting article. (I read the
Interesting article. (I read the linked story which had lots of good comments and then just skimmed the NYT article.)
While I'm getting a few (a very few) dollars from running ads on my site, and would love to make money from advertising, I think it's wrong to say it's "stealing" to block ads, the same as I don't have any problems with using TiVo to avoid watching TV ads.
People are blocking ads on web sites and skipping them on TV largely because they're so obnoxious, and this is the fault of the advertisers. (Although with TV there is also the interruption of the show, which to me is intolerable no matter how good the advert is.)
I also think that unless AdBlock is enabled by default in a browser, there's not going to be all that many people who use it. People stick with defaults for the most part. The ones who seek out and install the plugin will be the ones who aren't going to respond to the ads anyway.