It seems like some others my sites are being bombarded with hits from a mob called AllResearch. Apparently one of the things they do is hit RSS feeds and suck down every page referenced, for some kind of indexing. Judging from the amount of traffic they’re burning up, they suck big-time, in fact. I mean, indexers usually put in a lot of hits on web sites, but these guys are hitting more than 10 times as much as the next one down the list, MSN.

These are the top hitters over at toxiccustard.com:

• 45541 sp1.allresearch.com
• 3448 msnbot.msn.com
• 3110 index.atomz.com
• 1328 crawl25-public.alexa.com

Time for a little .htaccess magic:

order allow,deny
deny from 38.144.36.
allow from all

So I was checking out copper (as you do), and followed the wikipedia copper entry link to EnvironmentalChemistry.com’s copper data, and I discovered that ad blockers are beginning to change the economics of the web. The web site whinged that they had detected ad blocking, and if I wanted to get the content I’d have to turn it off (and provided directions – which I followed, but it just turned out to be a bunch of atomic numbers and covalent bonds and useless crap like that).

The economics of a lot of the web are not dissimilar to those of free-to-air television; there’s a covenant between the producers (broadcasters/webauthors) and the consumers – we will let this stuff out to anyone, and you will consume our advertising. Advertisers give the producers cash to cover the costs of publishing. There’s a profit in it, and everyone’s happy.

Except that consumers have decided they don’t like the deal anymore. People are taping TV shows, and skipping the ads. People are using ad blockers in their browsers. The economics of the model are breaking down. I personally am behaving this way because I find the advertising increasingly intrusive and irrelevant, and thus annoying. The ads suck, for products that suck, and they’re shoved down my throat. So I avoid them. This is how a character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact became the richest man on earth – by selling TV ad blockers.

The three outcomes I can forecast from this are:

1. increased relevance of advertising (unlikely, the reason advertising is necessary is because of an inherent suckiness of the products, otherwise they’d be compelling)

2. decreased expenditure on content provision (on TV, cheaper nastier shows – if that’s possible; on the web, uneconomic sites being pulled or at least not updated)
3. product placement, which is a bit like 1, ‘cept different because it’s more about appropriate products in appropriate places

I for one have no idea how this will play out, but I’m sure advertising will get more subtle. It’s done that over the last century, and will continue to in response to increasing consumer sophistication. Perhaps advertisers will find a way to back off, and only offer their products to customers who want them; they certainly want to act that way, because it’s a waste of money advertising women’s sanitary napkins to the gay male viewers of Friends — unless they’re planning to fix their car’s leaky roof with one.

BTW, how did they figure out I was blocking their ads?

Well the advance warnings the other day were a bit muddled up, but Apple has announced new iPod models and a price drop in the old ones. I don’t have one, but I’m certainly thinking about it… if you buy one in the next little while, make sure you don’t pay the old price!

To me the full-size iPod appeals because you can literally chuck all your music onto it, and the wide range of accessories available. But the iPod mini (especially the new bigger capacity ones) appeal for the smaller size and longer battery life. Maybe I’ll go shopping.

About two metres from my desk at work, is one of those new multi-function polisprinter things. It’s been churning away all week, page upon page upon page. Most of the time the noise isn’t unbearable, but sometimes it does get difficult to concentrate. Whiz, whirr, ka-chunk, all week.

So yesterday morning, for the first time this week, I needed to print something – two measly pages. Do you think it would do it for me? Hell no! Some kinda of network printer server outage.

And what’s particularly annoying is Word didn’t just come back and say “hey, I can’t do it”. No, it sat there for about two minutes with the print dialogue hung, Word disabled, while it worked out that it couldn’t do it. Somewhere, there’s a timeout setting that’s set way too high. I reckon if it’s not working in 30 seconds, it’s not working period. I’ll go rummaging around in the settings.