... according to Jim Moore, a well-known blogger.

He states emphatically that it's about choice and control, in an increasingly interactive DIY (Do-It-Yourself) world.

Hey, that sounds like what we are working on ... offering bloggers unprecedented choce and control over what they publish, when and to where .. with the included ability to choose which keywords *pull-and-place* relevant contextual advertising for blog posts.

Why not control and *own* your content, instead of always relying on an algorithm that decides for you what advertising you publish ?

From Jim's recent blog post titled "Madison Avenue Meets Craig's List".


Choice is king, meaningful choice. TV and Movies have been driven by users to go from a few channels of content, to many channels, to modular, downloadable content.

During the same period there has been no progress by mainstream media to offer choice in advertising. And yet that is what the consumer wants.

Witness the rise of other forms of commercial choice, starting with e-commerce itself. In ALL e-commerce the consumer chooses to interact with advertising. Duh. This is a preference. When I want to buy something, when I want to shop, I do not resist advertising, I embrace it and seek it out. Help me do this and I will return the favor and trade with you.

On the contrary, mainstream media spends billions each year on secretive profiling and "targeting" of customers against their will. Even more self-destructively, mainstream media companies led the fight against ad skipping, when they should have been offering ad substitution. Mainstream media companies fought against Tivo and Replay in their original form, investing in their own "closed" recording services. Mainstream media promoted "product placement" to the point that it has become a joke. My kids have fun spotting stupid product placements.

Wake up, folks in the media. Become a facilitator of information exchange, not a blocker.


And in a related development, Microsoft has announced Fremont, it's response to Google Base ... both initiatives address online classified advertisment listings. The Marketwatch sub-headline reads "Newspaper publishers are about to confront yet another competitor for their dwindling classified advertising revenues".


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