Does the Adsense algorithm run backwards?

What if Google’s Adsense has it backwards? Even if Google is pretty good at matching relevant ads to individual blogs, wouldn’t Ads be much more relevant if the bloggers handpicked them? Now why, you ask, would bloggers hand pick ads? Two reason: Partly for the same reason they are motivated to maintain a blogroll – people like sharing things they like. More importantly, because advertisers should want to pay much more for that. Afterall, Blogvertisers get paid $5 a pop to infuse discussion boards and comment posts with sneaky product placements.Right now, advertisers pay for Google’s algorithm because it finds relevant footholds in the blogosphere. ¿But what if there was an ad-mosphere, a social network of advertisers, where blogs could handpick products they liked to offer pay-per-click referrals from their blog. That sounds like a pretty good symbiotic environment.

photo credit: http://www.thinklear.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/adsense_western_union.jpg

Stop putting a sticker on every tomato

I hate that they put stickers on each piece of fruit. This month I’ve been talking about heat-branding the produce. I thought to search for laser-etched produce and I just found this – glad to see the idea is on its way. From http://chewonthatblog.com/2007/07/17/the-writing-on-the-wall/

“Piclens” for all media types

Have you seen piclens yet? If not, check it out: Yesterday I was getting excited thinking about how relatively easy it must be to develop browsing software like this. The trick is to preload media in a low-res format and show it in the periphery of your real focus. The concept is that you can gather a LOT of information from scanning low-res data.

We need this for all media types. And we should use it for skimming content posted in people’s social networks. Want to hear a radio station?, you should be able to browse people’s myspace pages and last.fm pages. Want to see videos? You should be able to quickly see a wall of videos that your friends are watching. Show the focus in normal resolution, and show lots of low-res previews in the periphery. Here is a crappy mockup of what if could be like to browse myspace music pages: