I’m happy to see that Google added RSS feeds for their news categories. Now if only they would add RSS feeds for Google Alerts. Update: It looks like you can create a customized feed by doing a google news search for keywords and then using the RSS or Atom link on the left. For example: rss feed for ‘crohn’s disease’
I’m finding myself viewing Bloglines more and individual pages much less. Unfortunately as this trend continues: as we spend more time in our feed readers and less time hitting the sites directly, we’ll see more and more advertisements showing up in the feeds. Like just about any technology that starts out useful and clean, it’ll soon be exploited.
Example: I went to see The Island this weekend. Before the movie started there were approximately 10 minutes of commercials. (when did theatres start doing that, by the way?). During the movie it seemed that every other scene had a very obvious product placement: Aquafina, MSN Search, Cadillac, the list goes on. It became actually distracting because it wasn’t subtle. The camera would zoom in on the logo and focus on its marketing goodness for more than enough time for you to get the message. It became especially ironic during the scenes where we see the newborn humans being “trained” and fed subliminal messages. “You want to go to the Island. You are very special.” I found myself saying mockingly, “No, I want a delicious and refreshing Aquafina. I am very special.” Is it any wonder people are watching more movies at home? What will Hollywood do next to recover from the slump? How about having commercial breaks during the film itself! That way you can charge even more advertising dollars. It’s brilliant!
Tags: Crohn's Disease, Movies, Web
August 9th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
I saw The Island on the weekend also and was aware of the product placement you’re talking about. I thought that it was so noticeable that it may have intentionally been over the top.
I laughed with the MSN search returned no results, and wondered if Google had paid for that product placement instead?
I also saw (for the first time in a film) lots of competing brands referenced, like Puma and Reebok. I wondered if they were pushing how branded society is in the future as an idea, rather than just for advertising purposes.
Either way, I thought the film was great.
August 9th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
It’s certainly possible. I don’t know. If it was intentionally over the top, they did a good job.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:13 am
Hollywood movies are: usually quite poor, riddled with ads in the movie, feature ads before the movie (in addition to the ads people give a special name for–”trailers”), and cost upwards of $10 to see. The solution to me is quite obvious: don’t go see them, don’t rent them, and deny the movie corporations my money. If you do see a movie on DVD, be sure to watch it on a free software system so that you can skip any part of the DVD you don’t want to see (not just the parts the DVD is encoded to let you skip).
August 10th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
Finally! Having news alerts e-mailed to me never really interested me but having them as an rss feed! Ahhh, thank you Google! And thank you for bringing them to my attention – going to add them to my feed reader now.
August 11th, 2005 at 7:59 am
Try watching Minority Report if you enjoy shamless advertising.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/
August 12th, 2005 at 10:04 pm
But the genius behind Minority Report is they know it’s shameless and that’s why they do it. It really fits in with Dick’s brand of writing and for those paying attention, it really hits home with what we have to look forward to.