Comments on: Thank you Bangalore

By: Arun

Arun — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:21:40 +0000

Try changing your wordpress admin password and then setting right the feed.

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:18:28 +0000

Thank you Varun

By: Varun Aggarwala

Varun Aggarwala — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:41:02 +0000

It was a pleasure attending your talk.

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:37:18 +0000

Kunalkant: Thanks so much for the kind words and for attending my talk: glad you like it. I agree.

FoolsGold: Sorry this post was so lengthy and difficult to navigate. As for your ad clicking (non)behavior: you are an atypical consumer.

“I NEVER click on an ad, even if it is precisely what I am looking for”

“I might re-type the URL in another browser window”

Then aren’t you punishing yourself as well? (Or at best wasting time?)

Web content is mostly free because of advertising. The best kinds of ads have useful information that you actually want (think yellow pages). If you truly don’t like even useful ads, then are you willing to pay for web content?

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:02:15 +0000

Wow. What has the internet come to? I thought the topic might be interesting, but links were buried in amongst a trip report about airports and traffic jams. Not in the mood to hear about the Philadelphia airport, NEVER in the mood to hear about Banglahore airport. When I started clicking on links I got a difficult to hear video and could not find any transcript which is what I would have preferred. I finally found the slide file and used that to determine what must have been discussed.
The one critical point that seems to be untreated was that users do not reward advertisers, they punish them! I NEVER click on an ad, even if it is precisely what I am looking for. At most I might re-type the URL in another browser window so as to avoid any click-reward or subsequent purchase-reward going to any of the entities involved in the advertisement. Also consider a firm such as Netflix, they are well known to have all these spam like windows that pop up at other sites, does anyone really think that some sort of auction is going get me to visit Netflix.. ever!! Do you think I will EVER eat at Applebees?
Las Vegas Travel …? Okay you can auction off the proximity space on the search page but there is one thing clear: I will most likely avoid any such high bidders, even if I have to go out of my way to do it. Most gamblers know that the better prices are obtained directly from the airlines, not the travel aggregators that bid for Proximity Space. Most gamblers also know that rooms are best booked directly with a hotel and not with any of these zillions of aggregator pages that exist. Most gamblers know that a casino can not comp your room if you buy it through a travel aggregator, casinos can only comp rooms bought directly through the hotel. So what is the auction doing? Its displaying disadvantageous options to the ill-informed searcher. Triumph of computer marketing, whether automated or not! Its nice that a Vegas Sky Diving company can have an automated auction market, but my response is and always will be “No, I ain’t gonna go skydiving!” Not in Vegas, not anywhere else!

By: Kunalkant

Kunalkant — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:12:54 +0000

Thanks David for wonderful talk.
It was really pleasure to listen the magic of hammer aka Prediction Market and concept applied in different situations, specially in advertising.
I believe, PM needs more attention and consumption for better world and decision making.

Love to hear more on applications of PM

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:57:06 +0000

Thanks Daniel. Ah, the eternal question.

By: Daniel Reeves

Daniel Reeves — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:46:02 +0000

Love the blow-by-blow! The hockey interlude is adorable.

One question: What *would* Sharad do?

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:01:01 +0000

Thanks Josh. You must be using Google Reader. Actually the feed is fine if you browse to it directly. My site was hacked and it is serving up a spammy feed — but only if Google requests it! (Thus mucking up my feed inside Google Reader.)

Compare this:
> curl http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/

with this:
> curl -A ‘Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 10 subscribers; feed-id=12312313123123)’ http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/

[Hat tip to Anthony Towns]

Any ideas out there how I can/should rectify this? Upgrading wordpress didn’t help.

‘grep -HiR BuyBuy *’ in my directory as well as a search for BuyBuy in my database yields nothing.

I’m continually amazed by the cleverness of web malfeasance, yet frankly I can’t fathom how this is helping the perpetrator.

By: Josh Reich

Josh Reich — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:31:38 +0000

Just a quick note, for some reason your RSS feed for this article reads like a bizzare spam email:

Thank you Bangalore
from Oddhead Blog by David Pennock

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