Phil Deakins

Deltango Vale wrote: The banner ads on SL Marketplace are sleazy. Yes, it looks like a cheap freebie site. Yes, it looks like a porn site. It gives the appearance that Linden Lab is scraping the bottom of the barrel to get revenue. It certainly pollutes the SL brand. I don't mind advertising, but ads for ambulance chasers? How low can you go? You are absolutely wrong. The ads don't make the SL site look like a cheap freebie site, and they don't make it look like a porn site. You are not very experienced on the web if if you have those opinions. Or maybe your main web experience is with cheap freebie sites and porn sites. They make the SL site look like a perfectly normal site. Moreover, the ads don't pollute the SL brand - not in any way. The only part of your post that may be right is when you said, "It gives the appearance that Linden Lab is scraping the bottom of the barrel to get revenue." You may be right about that. Of course, you may be wrong too. I see it as nothing more than LL being sensible enough to take advantage of some free money. But I may be wrong about that.

I took the time to watch the video and I have a few comments to make. 1. The first example he gave was Facebook. What Facebook did was stupid - IF they actually did what he said, which I find hard to believe. Judging by other things he said, I prefer to think that Facebook didn't do what he said they did. 2. He exaggerated Google's capabilities. It's true that Google has been personalising the search results for quite some time, or at least they were working on it the last time I heard, and, according to this chap, they are doing it. Good for them! It's bound to have improved the search results. He actually showed an example of the improved search results but he passed it off as a bad thing. Pure propagana. His exaggeration is that there is no way in the world that Google can know what he wants the audience to believe Google knows. I.e. your location. For that, his diagramme shows "sitting", the intention being to show that Google can know where in your house you are, which, of course, is bollocks. Pure propaganda. 3. He mentioned that news is also personalised. Excellent! I don't use news sites but, if i did, I'd very much appreciate them being tailored to the sort of news that interests me. I have to say that I stopped watching the video at that point (half way through) because it was already blatantly obvious that the guy is simply scaremongering. He's probably the sort of person who wants absolutely nothing about him to be known by anyone at all unless he gives explicit permission, and he wants people to believe that there are 'reds under the beds!'. We see posts to that effect in forums. I'm sorry, Perrie, but that guy lost his credibility as far as I'm concerned, very early on - with the misinformation (propaganda) about Google. Personalising things on the web is a huge plus, and not a negative thing at all.

Perrie Juran wrote: Commenting in general now, not to any one specific. I posted this in the Merchants thread also. Ads don't bother me per se, I've come to accept them (have I been brain washed?) as a part of the Internet. It's what pays for the content I get to enjoy so freely, and over all I accept the trade off. One of the things some of us or possibly even many of us loved about SL when I started was that it was basically free of corporate taint. For the most part, at least as it appeared to me, very few were buying virtual Nike running shoes or Toyota's to drive around the Grid in. Some of us, and maybe even many of us, saw those things as an invasion of Our World, Our Imagination. We were tuning in to SL to at least in part, tune out of RL. So while there is no specific statement to this effect, my worry is that LL would try to bring this advertising In World, the one place that I absolutely would not want to see stained by this stuff. Kind of goes back to the old question, is anything safe (sacrosanct) any more? The thing is, you were interested in a camera lens, so ads about lenses suited you. You may no longer be interested in them but they were tailored to you personally - and that's good. The other thing is that you weren't getting extra ads for lenses - you were getting the same number of ads. If you didn't get ads for lenses, you'd have got ads for other things. So I don't see any problem with the ads you were getting. I will be right alongside you if LL brings the ads inworld. I don't see how they can do it though, because, although the search does use a browser, the display size isn't big enough to accomodate the target pages after clicking on ads. I can't think of any other place they could put them.

You are reading far too much into it, 16. For instance, no 3rd party can know what you buy on the marketplace. They may or may not be able to know that you looked at virtual ponies, but that's all. The overall effect of 3rd parties gathering the small amount of data that's available to them, is that you personally will sometimes receive advertisements that are tailored to your interests, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, there's everything good with that. The scenario where an adult visits porn sites, and then, when children are watching, visits other sites and receives ads that advertise adult stuff, is tough. If anyone is in the position of risking that, they should use an an blocker so they won't be embarrassed. The SL site is no difdferent to any other site you visit. Every site you visit can know roughly where you are in the world (from your IP address), but they can't get your name, your gender, you age, etc. etc. etc. They can know what browser you use, and they can know which webpage you were viewing. All that is common to every website you visit. Everything you've said about what can infered from URLs is common to every website you visit. It's just the way thing are, and all anyone can do is accept it. Making use of the small amount of data that every website owner can have about you is for everyone's benefit. It's for your benefit because you will occasionally receive ads about things that you're interested in, and it's for the advertisers' benefit because they will get to show ads to people who have an interest in what they are advertising. It's a win all round. Anyone who doesn't like it can opt out. Personally, I think it's good.

I'm afraid I don't agree that the 2 reasons you gave are valid reasons for openly objecting to websites including affiliate ads. About your first reason: The world is full of ads. Accepting that fact is the only realistic option, and everyone has the choice of using an ad blocker for the web, so web ads don't have to be seen if a person doesn't want to see them. What you wrote isn't a vaild reason for openly objectging to ads on the web. About your second reason: As you sai, TV advertising is fine, but not because it's often targeted. It's because it pays for TV programmes to be made and channels to broadcast them on. Your internet advertising attitude sounds a bit paranoid to me. If you don't want your privacy to be "completely demolished" (your words), you really must get off the internet altogether. But that lack of total privacy has nothing to do with advertising, except that it facilitates the ads you see to be targeted to you personally. That's the very thing that you thought was ok about TV advertising. So your second point is about privacy and not about advertising, and, therefore, it isn't a reason for objecting to the ads. Finally: Objecting to advertising is unrealistic and, therefore, invalid as an open objection. Disliking them is fine, and taking steps to avoid them is fine, but publically objecting to advertising is simply an invalid objection.

Dillon Levenque wrote: I think Phil has written that he did once do a lot of work with internet data mining/advertising/that sort of thing, so I'll just read both of your perspectives and learn. But it's no use you trying to ignore things by posting to unrelated topics. I've never done any data-mining. I was an SEO until SL captured me, but my experiences for this thread's topic is that I've dealt with affiliate ads on my sites for many years. I've even had sites containing nothing but affiliate ads. In the past I made a lot of money from them but, as with everything I do, my interest wore thin over time, and now I just get a smallish monthly amount from them because I stopped keeping up with them. You have to maintain top search rankings to do well, and I lost interest in keeping up with the ever-changing search engines. Just for the interest... There is a lot of money to be made from it though. It's time has not passed. It's not even essential to be able to get top search rankings, although that ability is the best way. There are people making plenty of money by arbitraging the ads. For instance, the ads on the right side of the Google search results are called AdWords. The AdWords advertiser pays Google an agreed amount every time someone clicks on the ad. Now, suppose I, as a non-seller, take out an AdWords ad and, when someone clicks on it, they go to my page, on which are more Google ads. AdSense ads. I have to pay Google for the click but, if the ads on my page are selected to be high-paying per click, then I can make a nice profit. There are people making loads of money by doing exactly that. And Google doesn't mind. It sounds like something that Google wouldn't allow, but they specifically stated that they allow it. I once set up a system that worked with a smaller search engine. All the results were ads - no organic results at all. In some fields, advertisers pay a lot for a click - gambling sites is one such field. The more you pay per click, the higher you rank in the results. What I did was select one of the top paying gambling ads and advertise the same ad a little lower down. It wasn't much lower down but the cost per click was a lot less. When someone clicked on my ad, my server received the page request from the engine, it then did another search on the engine for the same searchterm, selected the equivalent high-paying ad from the results, did an auito-click on the one I was copying, and sent the user to the high-paying advertiser's site. The result was that I paid a low amount for the click on my ad, and I was paid my affiliate share for the click on the high-paying ad. The user got to where s/he wanted to go, the engine got paid twice, the high-paying advertiser paid what s/he expected to pay and got the user to the site. Everyone was a winner. Things like the above do need hands-on though. There is plenty of money to be made from it but it does need to be watched. In the second example (my system) I didn't last long doing it because it needed watching too much. The amount an advertiser pays for a clickthrough often changes - sometimes daily. It took too much watching over so I stopped it. I don't think the Google-type arbitrage scheme is as active in terms of those changes but it would still need careful watching.

I forgot about another bit of data that 3rd parties get - your user-agent (browser). When you get a webpage or a file from a server, one line is recorded in the server's logfile. The line is made up of various bits of data, some of which relate to you. The parts that relate to you are your IP address, the URL of the page the request came from, and your user-agent (browser). That's all. No other data about you is passed to the server. If you click a link on a page, the URL that is passed is the URL of the page you are leaving. If a page requires a graphic file or an ad file, then the URL that is passed is the URL of the page that requires the file. An affiliate ad is a file that is fetched from a 3rd party server, and, in this case, the page requesting it is an LL page. A 3rd party, such as an affiliate advertising center, can store that data about you. They can record other pages on the web that you visit, but only pages that also fetch a file from that 3rd party server. They can't track you across the web. The only way you can be tracked everywhere is if you have a 3rd party toolbar installed in your browser. The Google toolbar, for instance. It's the toolbar that does the tracking. The possible deductions you suggested are mostly correct. But the question they raise is, so what? :- 1. Your IP address is irrelevant because you give it to every site you visit on the web. The only ways to opt out of that are by getting off the web altogether, or by using a proxy server - but then the proxy owner will then have your IP address. So forget about your IP address. 2. So what if you read english? 3. One of the URLs does appear to show that you have some financial dealing with the SL site, but it doesn't show that you have any money. That deduction is incorrect. Also, everyone has some money (not necessarilty in that account ), so who cares is someone else realises that you have some money? 4. So you are interested in virtual boots but not expensive ones. So what? 5. As far as I know, the only way to get your account name from the forum's user-id number is to use it to look up your profile - but I'm not sure about that. Either way, your username public anyway, and I really can't see any benefit to an affiliate center in knowing that 16 is interested in virtual boots that sell for less than $2 And what affiliate center is going to be interested enough to make a special effort to convert a user-id number into a username of someone in Second Life? (It would have to be special effort to get that information). The latter part of your post is more realistic. Profiles of people who use the web are built up by 3rd parties. Doubleclick has been doing it for many years. One of Google's founders was big into data-mining, so it's extremely likely that Google has also been doing it for many years - probably at least as long as Doubleclick. (Google now owns Doubleclick, incidentally). But it's not a bad thing and the experience you described is the reason. If ads come my way, it is better for me if they advertise things that interest me. That's the reason for gathering the information - to advertise things that the individual is interested in. That's good, not bad. And don't forget - advertising is good and positive. It is not bad or negative. So personalised advertising is even better, and that's what the gathering of information by ad centers is all about. We don't know how LL has set up the affiliate ads. If the URLs you showed are the ones that are sent to the 3rd party, then some irrelevant deductions can be made from them - IF the 3rd party thinks it's worthy of a special effort. If I were a boot seller in SL, I might make that effort, but if I'm Google/Doubleclick, I wouldn't because trageting buyers of virtual goods is much too small. I might profile you as being interested in virtual realities though, and target ads about that to you, but I'd only need the secondlife domain name in the URL to add that to your profile.

16 wrote: I think for me that 3rd party adverts on the general webpages and marketplace when not logged in are ok + I worry a little bit tho about 3rd party adverts when logged in on your SL account. 3rd party meaning non-SL members one of the foundations of SL has always been privacy. like anonymity. as we choose or not for ourselves. linden have always guarded this jealously up til now linden enabling 3rd party advertisers the opportunity to make associations between our SL persona and our RL visits to other websites is quite a fundamental change to our current understanding of linden and SL It doesn't work like that, 16. 3rd party advertisers have no access whatsoever to your SL persona. All they can ever get is your IP address and the URL of the page you are on. Just like everyother page and file request that your browser makes. That's it. It makes no difference whether or not you are logged into the site.

XbabylonX wrote: I give up! I cant "fight" with most of you anymore. Seems that you are made of stone. Why try to fight at all? Most people in the thread said that you handled it wrongly, so why not learn instead of fight? And why threaten someone to try and get the person out of Busy mode? That's what you claimed to have done, although it looks very different in your original post. In your original post, you made the threats before the other person went into Busy mode. So did you leave some of the stuff out, or did you lie to me? When someone is in Busy mode, it means they don't want to talk with you. If you weren't lying to me, then what you did is worse than people in this thread realised.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: to be nice is one human quality but there are a lot of other ones that i can enjoy... Like ability to listen, cleverness, being openmind, tolerance, humour, honnesty, loyality, integrity, generosity, etc.... Trying to get back with me, eh?

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Phiiilllll ! you are already cheating me ? and with 16 ? /me slap the door and looks for her lawyer phone number. I thought we were divorced. And I was never married to 16. Come to think of it, I don't remember you and I getting married so how come we're divorced?

Then I fear that there's no hope for you

Just a related aside... I am very surprised how much some people dislike advertisements. I can't understand it. The only thing I can think of is that it is on principle because ads don't get in anyone's way, and the 'on principle' reason is not a valid reason at all. I'm not talking about things like spam phone calls, spam mail, and spam email, all of which require a small amount of time to deal with, so they do get in the way a little bit. I'm in the UK where one of the top TV providers is Virgin Media. (VM). VM have the sole UK rights to TiVo, which is an american PVR (personal video recorder) that is full of features that no other system in the UK can even get close to. The TiVo is designed so that ads can be put in a lot of places - in the menus, etc. Recently ads started appearing when the Pause button is pressed - both live and recorded programmes. The ads are unintrusive, especially since pausing a programme is done when choosing to stop watching the screen temporarily. But some people strongly object to the ads and I don't understand why. Like here, the objectors are a small but significant minority. I suppose I'm writing this post to state that there is no valid reason whatsoever to object to the sort of ads being complained about in several threads here, and in VM threads concerning the TiVo. The idea that 'I just don't want to be advertised to', which I've seen written, doesn't hold even a drop of water as a valid reason. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have that attitude because it's entirely up to each individual. What I do say is that those people ought not to object to the sort of ads they object to. Even if there is no way to avoid them, they ought not to object because it's an extremely selfish attitude. But there is always the alternative of simply not using places where ads appear. If there are valid rerasons, I'd like to know what they are.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: Six Igaly wrote: Agree! And that is why I pay for the services (without LL no SL right). Just as I buy apps for my smartphone, to support the developers and to not have advertisements with it. You don't pay for LL services not to have advertisements; i.e. no ads is not part of the deal bectween you and LL. You simply pay for LL services. You do have an alternative if you are so much against seeing advertisements - stop using the places that show them. It's *entirely* your choice No you have another alternative : Install adblock or adblock plus and bye bye ads ! That too.

Ok. Names are still being suggested, so I'm going to make my suggestion. There are many truly nice people in the forum but I'm going to name the one who I gave a clue about in my first post, when I said that she is "sweet". Her name is 16 - sweet 16. I can't recall ever seeing her be anything other than nice (and often humorous). Even when she is writing something negative about someone, she always writes it in a nice and helpful way.

Six Igaly wrote: Agree! And that is why I pay for the services (without LL no SL right). Just as I buy apps for my smartphone, to support the developers and to not have advertisements with it. You don't pay for LL services not to have advertisements; i.e. no ads is not part of the deal bectween you and LL. You simply pay for LL services. You do have an alternative if you are so much against seeing advertisements - stop using the places that show them. It's *entirely* your choice

Every revenue source helps LL to pay the bills.

Amber Malifozik wrote: I really have to wonder if this is a good call? Does it really pay that much to that it's worth making your page almost useless? Not to mention all those 5%'s of lost sales. It covers everything from the left of the sign in link and all the way and as far down until it covers up all the lables for the search boxes. This includes the navigation tabs as well. I have to say I hate it. Firefox 19.0.2 is up to date The ads are fine. LL is free to put whatever they want on their websites, and nobody has any justifiable reason to object, but sometimes website designers aren't very good and their designs can cause the problem you are seeing. In this case, it sounds like your browser doesn't use the full width of the screen and the vertical ad is pushed in from the side, covering some of the content. It's the use of cascading style sheets (css) in the site design, which is extremely common these days, and not covering all main possibilities, that cause it.

16 wrote: from the testimonals other people putting on here for you then we can deduce that you seem to be a lovely person when you get your own way if not then you get heavy. like threaten. and you have no shame in carrying out threats you make in your own best interest SNAP! I'd only read part of the first page when I wrote my post (above). The I read a few more posts and came across yours, in which you come to exactly the same conclusion as I did

So instead of acting sensibly in the face of a bit of rudeness, you decided to be threatening, which was really stupid on your part. Some people can be rude for no good reason, and it can have the effect of hurting some feelings, but you have to accept that and not make a big thing about it. From your own piosts, it sounds like you've contacted many store owners and received many non-rude replies. If the majority of replies were rude, I could understand you wanting to post about rudeness in general. But when it's only rude reply out of many, and your immediate reaction threaten the person, your charatcer is seen an being much worse than the rude person's character. The impression I now have of you is that you are a very nice person as long as nobody says anything rude or bad to you, but if someone does, you will make them "regret it" by shaming them in public. That's not a nice character at all.

Deltango Vale wrote: I saw the ads on SL Marketplace. Teeth whitening? Ambulance chasers? Five Aces real poker? Squash the spider to win? I don't mind banner ads, but does LL really have to stoop to the level of a porn site? The level of porn sites? That's rubbish. Perhaps you are very familiar with porn sites and not so familiar with other sites.

madman626 Fall wrote: well no joking but we talking about MP here are we ? Yes.

Lorraine Jupiter wrote: "What is on a website is the sole business of the owner(s), and nobody ele's business at all - not yours and not mine." The content sold on that site is made by the people who post their wares there. They have an interest in the site. The site would have no reason to exist without user content. You are right, of course, but, as I said, what is on a website is the sole business of the owner(s), and nobody else's business at all - not yours and not mine - and that includes all of LL's websites. If a person doesn't like what LL does with their own websites, they are free to not use them. The fact of posting stuff for sale in the marketplace site, doesn't give anyone any rights in the site, or what is displayed on the pages, whatoever. The marketplace pages are all owned by LL, and nobody else, and what goes on those pages is solely LL's business. Whether or not there are alternatives to the marketplace is irrelevant but, as it happens, there are alternative places to buy and sell SL stuff - SL, for instance.

I remember when Google first started and began to get users. I thought, "Great. Another search engine to play with" I was an SEO. You are right - their mantra was "Do no evil". But after some years, when, through their advertising (AdWords and then AdSense) they'd made themselves in the *the* big player, they did some unscrupulous things such as... 1 Altering other people's web pages in web users' browsers. That had nothing whatsoever to do with users using the Google engine. If a person had the Google toolbar, and they got a page from a website - any website - that contained an ISBN book number, the toolbar would alter the page and turn the ISBN number into a link to the Barnes & Noble site. That was unscrupulous because it cheated both the user who assumed that the webpage author intended them to use the link, and the website owner where the page came from because nobody has any right at all to alter their pages when they are viewed in a browser. * 2. Publishing the books of authors against the authors' stated wishes. Google do it because they can do it legally - because they can. Google doesn't gain by it but the authors do lose by it. It's a nasty thing to do. Both of those things contravened Google's mantra - Do no evil. As far as I know, they still do those unscrupulous things, and those kind of activities are what makes me seriously want Google to go into decline. Another thing I seriously dislike about Google that isn't in quite the same league as the above examples, is their image search. I'm ok with the image search but I'm not ok with Google fetching the images on-the-fly from the websites that contain them. If you click one of the images in the image search results, you get a Google page displayed that contains the actual size image, and that image is brought from the site that has it in it's page. The bandwidth used for it is at the website owner's expense but there is no way for a website owner to opt out of being abused by Google in that way. *Note: I've just had a look at Google's image search and it's changed since I last used it. Maybe they no longer use other people's bandwidth and maybe they still do. I haven't checked. It wouldn't make any difrerence to me if they've stopped doing it because they did it for many years without any concience whatsoever, and they are the same people.

16 wrote: google just now banned ad blocking apps from the google play store. seems they not very happy about that lol (: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-pulls-ad-blocking-apps-from-play-store-for-violating-developer-distribution-agreement/ It's not surprising. Google is the biggest advertising agency in the world. It's their main business. They have other irons in the fire (not the search engine because search doesn't make money) but advertising is their main stock in trade by a *very* long way. ETA: I am more than happy with ad blockers, if only for the reason that I want Google to be reigned in. They have become much too big on the web and have been doing some unscrupulous and immoral things, and it's the profitability of their advertising section that's made them much too big.