20.12.12

Of Java and Assembler

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:04 pm by Liv

The title would no doubt puzzle quite a few of you — after all I’m putting in the same sentence a low-level, processor-specific language (for no better term for “assembler” — I know, I know, I know, “it’s not really a language”, right?) with a rather high-level, even platform-independent language like Java. So, right away you’d all be asking yourself “well, what can they have in common?” — or probably thinking that this is an article looking at how far apart these 2 languages are. The thing is, they’re not actually that far apart! Yup, I’m going to say that again and re-phrase is so the purpose of this post becomes more clear: they are quite similar in fact!

Now, I bet this got your attention, didn’t it ? Rest assured, I didn’t just say it for the sake of it — I will try to explain throughout this post how that is possible. And if you decide to read it all, and happen to work within the JVM space, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this — either via a comment here or simply drop me a line.

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17.01.12

Advertising or Information?

Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:52 pm by Liv

This goes out to all you ad skeptics out there who bang on about how useless the internet advertising is and how it should be banned / destroyed / 101′d etc: it is sad that not often advertising is delivered as a complement to the content being viewed, and as such it doesn’t come across as an intrusive piece on the page. However, when it happens, it creates something useful!

I have just experienced something like this just now, looking at some technical article online — and even though I worked for Vibrant Media before, there’s no hidden agenda in highlighting this ad unit I spotted as one such piece of great advertising. (I know I slagged them off in the past as well, hope they don’t take it personally : guys, I’ve slagged off Google more than you, so don’t read too much into it! )

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11.12.11

This Is Where It Began…

Posted in Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 7:03 pm by Liv

I tweeted this photo the other day as well but I thought it deserves a bit more than just a tweet — having just met up with some old ex-Vibrant Media colleagues, right in the neck of the woods where we all started from. For all of you ex-Vibrant Media (or still in Vibrant Media) peeps who started in the London office, you will remember this — the small office on 2nd floor and the bars around it. Brings back some memories, huh?

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03.10.11

Quality Job Targeting on LinkedIn

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 1:42 pm by Liv

Today seems to be my “funny things I see on the web” day — I just logged into LinkedIn to be targeted in the job section with an interesting one: a job offer from Vibrant Media (who I worked for till a few years ago):

If that job is based on my previous jobs (which LinkedIn knows of) then this is brilliant retargeting, hats off to LinkedIn!

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20.01.11

Kontera: In Your Face And Not In-Text Advertising?

Posted in Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 12:36 pm by Liv

Just came across this from Kontera — another one of the ahem “in-text advertising leaders” alongside Vibrant Media and others — can these ads get more in your face than this?

I mean, it’s bad enough for the in-text solutions the fact that they exploit the accidental hovers over their keywords, which I find quite annoying (and it was one of the areas in Vibrant Media we tried to address constantly in order to improve the user experience) — but this one goes further: first of all the ad unit is huuuuuuge! I didn’t take a screenshot of my whole screen as I use quite a high resolution and as such you would have to scroll the image to see my whole screen, however, I can assure you that we’re missing only about 10-20% at the browser window at max — so you can judge for yourself how big the ad unit is! Secondly, they showed the very same ad twice in the same paragraph! That’s always a bad idea from a user perspective as it develops a user fatigue very quickly, so even users that might have been tempted by the ad on the first view, seeing the second one (probably by accidently hovering over the keyword) will just annoy the user and in most cases cancel the initial intention to click on it. And on top of it the Kontera ads have the bad “habit” of remaining on page for a while after user has moved the mouse — so you can see for yourself straight away that the outcome is user fatigue (same ad), user annoyance (takes over a large “realty” of the page — even more so when there’s 2 of them open at the same time! — and also the ad units remain on the page for a long period of time) and ultimately decreased CTR (each such page will generate 0 clicks per 2 adviews so your CTR will be decreasing rapidly for this campaign!). Not to mention that it would have been a fair chunk of bandwidth to serve that campaign that costs Kontera money. Seriously, have these guys have a product manager who approved this? If that’s the case and I was them I’d fire his bad ass right away … but that’s just me! :p

And here’s the big boo-boo

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