To my handful of readers: Rumours of my death have been exaggerated. Not quite as much as those of Gordon Lightfoot, but nonetheless. While there have been a lot of things happening in the world recently, there’s been little time for me to comment on them. I’ll attempt to remedy that in the future.

This article caught my eye today: Online Advertising Revenues Climb Out Of The Trough, Boosted By Search, Display, And Video

I found it interesting because I work in an industry closely tied to online advertising. But how close? Without going too far into the details, my employer is in the Digital Signage space. Thus every piece of media we produce either links to, or connects with advertising in some way shape or form. But is it online? What does that even mean anymore?

In my previous post, I suggested we do away with the term “Digital” as its meaning has become too convoluted and disconnected from reality to have any… well… meaning. I propose the same with “Online.” On the surface, it seems like a term with a fairly clean and simple meaning; you’re either online, or offline. Or are you?

Smartphones, wifi, GPS, Satellite Radio, RFID, Web-enabled TV, …Web-enabled FRIDGES. All of these have rendered the idea of being “offline” almost meaningless. If you lose your network connection to your desk/laptops, its entirely possible that you have a completely separate connection available on your mobile devices. Even newspapers are becoming ever more available on eReaders and mobiles.

As far as advertising goes, what this means is that the distinction between “online” and “offline” also needs to change. “Offline” advertising then, is essentially anything on paper or slapped up on a wall. Everything else… EVERYTHING is online. So what this makes me think, is that if “online” ad revenue is starting to “climb out of a trough” (especially during the current climate), what on Earth is happening to ad dollars from other “traditional” or “offline” forms of media? Further, now that you can have circuitry embedded in the surface layer of a contact lens, how long will it be before display advertising can be targetted to specific eyeballs?

Why would you even bother with paper or brick-and-mortar advertising at that point?

[I apologize to any Bjork fan who reads the title of this post and now has that song stuck in their heads. ]

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.