On.. My Internet Hive Mind

I no longer know anything.  I have ceased to hold knowledge in my brain for long periods.  Effectively my mind has become an array of pointers to actual information sources powered by a sophisticated search and retrieval system.

What has caused this complete emptying of retained knowledge?  The internet.

It is now easier and more reliable for me to look up solutions to problems than to work them out for myself.  A quick search with the correct key words or phrases and I’ll have the answer to my question in minutes.  When presented with a bug, unless it is something very obvious, the error is copied and pasted into Google, in quotation marks with msdn added to the end.  A few seconds later I’ll be staring at the answer to the issue.

Is this bad?  Yes!  I’ve stopped understanding at a level that I would like the issues affecting my code.  I can find an answer, work through the steps to fix the problem, get the code running again and forget about it, without truly understanding what I have just done.  In the long term this can’t be good for the quality of code.

Is there a solution?  Yes!  I work on a couple of applications on the way home on the train each evening.  Its a thirty minute window with no internet access.  If I come across a problem I need to fix it by working through the issues.  If I don’t know how to do something off the top of my head I need to check out what the .NET framework will let me do and what methods are available.  Occasionally I will need to look something up, which I can do when I get home, preferably in a book, but once or twice I’ve taken to the internet for answers.

By trying to limit my internet use I have found that I have a much more complete understanding of the solutions I am building on the train, which in turn means I am fixing bugs faster, and stopping them occurring in the first place more often.

If you are finding you are using the internet as your default bug fixing tool perhaps it might be worth having a “no internet answers” day or try programming and application or a module without referring to the internet for your answers.  If it is overly frustrating at first then you know that you are relying heavily on other people to solve your problems.

On.. Web based adverts

It didn’t come as a huge surprised that the demographic of people that click on adverts when browsing the web are not necessarily the most savvy of people, or indeed the people that you might want visiting your site.

I run a couple of sites that could happily take adverts as a source of revenue, the problem comes that I want the relationship to work for both parties.  Sure I could just bung on some google adwords and get a bit of money each month, but its not good enough, I’ll have no real relationship with the people advertising on my site and no real control over the quality of the products being advertised to my users.  Then there are the users who automatically block adwords and the like, so there is no benefit for advertisers there.

The unfocused and all pervasive nature of internet advertising has created a situation where they are no longer doing what they intended.  What advertising through google and other advert aggregators is basically a scatter-gun approach, spray your message over a large area and someone might see it, hardly the well targeted advertising that might actually achieve some results.

I’m guessing that Adwords and the like must work for some people otherwise they wouldn’t pay for it?  Or is it just a case of hard numbers, it is easy to track so anything that comes through looks like success.

The problem isn’t that Adwords exist, its the fact that a suitable alternative is difficult to come by.  I’ve often considered sponsorship for sites, however I feel that is the road to having to consider your content in relationship to your sponsors.  Maybe this is the commercial reality of wanting to fund your website activities, somewhere along the line you are beholden to someone if they are putting money in.

I’m intrigued by things like Ebay affiliates and the similar Amazon scheme.  They seem much more targeted, for my there is an issue around customisability, I’d like to make them much more dynamic, maybe have the searches and results based on the meta data within the page, or content, yet it doesn’t seem to be able to handle this.  With the ebay one in particular I’d like to make all links on my site to ebay go via my ebay affiliates ID, they don’t offer this as an out the box solution, I can hack a solution together, so it appears that the link came up on one of the searches it displays in its banner, but I’m not sure if I’ll violate some terms of service agreement and forfit and money from it.

The big issue is that if online advertising metrics do start to show a negative correlation between the desired results and the actual results then the bottom falls out of the web, again.  Maybe bubble 2.0 won’t be the result of an over abundance of social networks and candy floss websites, but it’ll be as a result of never getting a proper handle on high quality advertising revenue models.