So it seems that the ads are getting more interesting over at LiveJournal…
…and by “interesting”, I mean “disruptive”.
There’s apparently a Flash file or three that I haven’t nailed down yet that make all sorts of noise on certain LJ pages. If anyone happens to know the domain wild card I could block to make the bad noises go away, I’d appreciate that information.
But, in light of all this, isn’t my slow, gradual phasing out of LiveJournal (and MySpace, who are guilty of similar things, and, not being too naive, I’m certainly looking over my shoulder while I’m on Facebook…) a terrific idea?
Evil, greedy people have purchased LiveJournal from another bunch of perhaps not as evil, but certainly greedy people, though I lean toward “evil” in my opinion of the Trotts in recent times, and after the supposed free lunch that our Internet social lives have had over the past decade, it would seem that services like these are becoming a bit more unfriendly in their old age, and it isn’t surprising, because every jargon whore’s favorite word, “monetization”, just isn’t happening.
Now, full disclosure, not that I need to defend myself, but: I serve text ads on both of my web sites. I do so because they’re unintrusive (and if they ever become intrusive, please contact me and let me know), and in the case of the Cock, it gives all the people who get confused by my domain name and my content a place to go. Things with audio, loading/streaming video, and things that you just plain can’t get rid of easily through ad blockers, those are what we call “evil”, because in Scott Crawford’s world, disruption is the most unspeakable evil.
You’re going to see a lot more of that particular evil in the coming months and years all over the ‘net after something of a lull, because “the shareholders”, which we’ll call them because “the cunts” isn’t very polite, are disappointed in ad earnings, and don’t have enough money to gas up their Hummers. Well, you silly bastards, maybe you should’ve paid attention to the fact that people hate annoying ads before you invested an assload of money in them, no? And about those vehicles…I’m thinking that eventually, people (not me, I’m not a violent sort) will get angry enough at you for ruining the Earth with them to see if the consumer grade versions hold up to explosive force as well as the military ones, so I’d consider maybe putting the things up on blocks, buying a cheaper car with what it takes to gas the thing up a few times, and letting the neighborhood kids fuck in the pieces of shit instead of driving it. After all, I hear they’re very roomy, and teenagers are always looking for new, creative places to get laid! But I’m off on a tangent, aren’t I?
Anyway, get good ad blockers now, and consider moving all your personally valuable content (anything from contact information for your friends to journal entries about how your sandwich sucked at lunch today, if you consider those valuable) to servers that you can exercise more control over. It doesn’t have to happen today, it can be gradual, don’t worry, but it’s worth investing the time, energy and bother into centralizing your data in a place where people who *need* to access it (yourself or others that you trust with it) aren’t at the mercy of stupidity like difficult-to-block multimedia ads, revolving door company buyouts, with each company getting progressively worse, or something totally ridiculous, like a company engaging in libel against you and your business because you used a funny name for your web site.
Now, granted, unless you develop an entirely new Internet or find an effective enough “swarm” method of content distribution and always-on connectivity (think BitTorrent taken a bit further) for you to maintain an online presence at all times without being beholden to any bandwidth provider, there’s always going to be some give and take, and no matter what any emboldened moron who talks about offshoring objectionable content may tell you, if there’s enough of a stake in it, yes, the people atop the hierarchy of the ‘net will eventually shut off entire countries in the interest of isolating that content or data. It’s gonna take something pretty spectacular for that to happen, but I bet that we see it at least once in our lifetimes, if there isn’t a current example of it happening that someone can point out.
However, for the most part, if you’re running your own site rather than piggybacking on a LiveJournal, a MySpace or whatever, like we used to do before everyone got lazy, you have a good deal more say as to what does or doesn’t appear on it. Maybe not absolute say, but the control’s significantly more than it is otherwise. Driving people to self-sufficient sites is tougher, but in a lot of ways, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, and the drawbacks are gonna start becoming even more visible, as I’ve pointed out. With all the talk about going “green” and reducing pollution and all that, perhaps it’s time that a concerted effort is made by people to go “data green”, avoiding harmful corporate audiovisual pollution whenever and wherever possible.
Just something to chew on as you get over your hangovers this Sunday morning, and with that, I’m off to go food shopping, and have some cashier give a database an inventory of everything this household uses, to cross-reference against previous shopping trips! Ta!
(And apologies if I sounded more British than usual when I typed this. I just watched 3 episodes of Doctor Who in a row, in the middle of the night, on a disrupted sleep schedule. You try sounding American after that.)