January 26, 2004

CREEPY BEEB

You’d hope that at least one of the BBC staffers present at meetings to discuss this might have thought: “You know, we could be doing something really, really stupid here.”

Posted by Tim Blair at January 26, 2004 09:59 PM
Comments

Yeah, you'd think there'd be *some* staffer with the balls to swallow the blue pill.

You'd think.

Posted by: Tongue Boy at January 26, 2004 at 11:05 PM

"advertising experiment"

LOL, I guess, is the right phrase.

Posted by: dazed at January 27, 2004 at 12:04 AM

You have to read to the sixth paragraph before you realize that "automatically directed to" does not mean automatically directed to, and that "buy up" means buying those little ads on the right hand side of the page. Creepy, yes, but hardly the crushing of dissent I imagined from the first paragraph.

Actually, I was much more worried about the prostitution of google, if they were going to allow all searches on a subject to be "automatically directed to" a single website.

By the way, I tried this on Google UK, and never saw the ad, though I refreshed several times.

Posted by: Angie Schultz at January 27, 2004 at 12:39 AM

"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes..."

Please stop the conflation of blue and red pills, it is a sign of colonialist imperialist uncoolness.

Posted by: Bob71 at January 27, 2004 at 12:57 AM

i didn't see any bbc ads either. seems a pretty stupid thing to me, none the less

Posted by: Mr. Bingley at January 27, 2004 at 12:57 AM

Bob71:

Oops! Not very sub-til; almost gave the game away. I just hope the
Ashcroft Brown Shirts don't track me down and punish me for my error; I hear Camp X-Ray should not be mistaken for Hedonism III...

Posted by: Tongue Boy at January 27, 2004 at 02:24 AM

I did the same thing, pairing ads for the "Beat It" single to any story involving molestation...

Posted by: Michael Jackson at January 27, 2004 at 02:55 AM

Another reason I don't live in Perfidious Albion: check out this page:
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence-lists/evidence-tvp.htm

Witness statements to the police are all "not for release"? Even the LIST of statements is witheld.

So much for "open and accountable"...

BAH!

Posted by: mojo at January 27, 2004 at 06:35 AM

There's more on this here:
The Strange Case of the BBC's Disappearing Google Adverts

I hope to post updates as more info is forthcoming.

Posted by: Scott Burgess at January 28, 2004 at 10:35 PM