Engadget rounds up all the rumors pertaining to today’s announcement from Apple. I’m pulling for the iPod Touch.
SEPTEMBER 6 UPDATE: $399 for a 16-gig iPod? I don’t care how cool the touchscreen is, if it’s not sporting at least 40 gigs, I’m not interested. On the other hand, a 160-gig iPod for $50 less? Now we’re talking.
AdBlock Plus is a chunk of ad-blocking software that claims 300,000 to 400,000 downloads a month. That’ll probably spike a bit higher as a result of yesterday’s New York Times article.
I downloaded and installed the AdBlock Plus plugin for my Firefox browser. It took about a minute: The plugin is small in size and all you need to do after downloading is restart your browser. Voila.
As a Web surfer, I absolutely love it. Pages are cleaner. They load faster. I get the information I’m looking for without having to close out annoying popups and deal with the irritations of animated banners. What’s not to like? Even About.com becomes pretty useful.
Especially interesting is the “open blockable items” option, which lets you see all the items being blocked on any given page you’re visiting (listed in red), plus additional items AdBlock suggests you might want to think about blocking (great for Jakob Nielsen disciples).
Oh, and not incidentally: AdBlock keeps your Web pages free of Google AdWords ads.
If you want to turn AdBlock Plus off and view the Web as Google and DoubleClick (which has 28 flagged items on its home page) and others intend it, you can do so with a fast click on the easy dropdown menu. You can also whitelist individual pages or sites so that AdBlock leaves them alone. Again: What’s not to like?
As a Web marketer, though, I’m … well, I’m cautiously optimistic.
I’m cautious, because this is a piece of simple software that, if it really catches on, could give the ad network folks some serious ulcers and cause the investment bankers to short their Google stock.
I’m optimistic, though, because this is an example of what I was referring to the other day: The Web is a medium in a state of perpetual flux. So don’t think that today’s advertising models will necessarily work tomorrow. The good news: That’s okay, as long as one stays nimble and responsive.
Takeaway for marketers: Download AdBlock. Try it. Think about it. And if your online strategy amounts to nothing other than banners and AdWords, think again.
Enjoy the holiday.
Over on the latest JOHO, David Weinberger noodles a bit on the idea that all norms on the Web will be “forever in flux.”
I think he’s on to something that will be the case for at least for the next decade or two, and I think it reaches beyond snarkiness and sarcasm and social norms all the way to business plans.
Because as the online norms constantly (and necessarily) change, so too must the ways in which companies interact with those norms. Yesterday’s Big Damn Deal can easily become tomorrow’s *yawn* Big Deal before you can say “return on investment.”
Takeaway for marketers: Online, it’s all about being nimble and responsive. Is your company wearing running sneakers or cement shoes?
Valleywag alerts us to this interesting blog post about the 15 countries restricting Internet access. Turns out the “Strange Maps” blog is pretty cool. You might have fun clicking around their archive. At the very least, check out this subway map of Web 2.0 sites.
