Microsoft to Provide and Sell Ads on Facebook.

Google signs $900m News Corp deal.

Like a lot of people, I've become a heavy Facebook user in the last 3 months. I'm a big one for publishing stuff on the web, photos, links, blog entries, etc, so I have spent quite a bit of time populating my Facebook profile, including adding which films, music, books and TV shows I like. I've entered information about my political and religious views. I've built my friends list to 75 people. I've even imported this blog's feed into my notes. I've gone nowhere near as far on MySpace, I'm just using that for music, so I've added a whole bunch of my favourite artists as friends.

Given the rich pool of data available to them, Microsoft and Google are completely failing the social networks in the advertising they provide. Time and time again I visit pages on these sites and see advertising of the most generic kind.

Sticking with Facebook, they know what products I've bought in the form of the movies and books I like. They know what other people like and can find common connections. Social recommendations have been around for ever, it's not rocket science. Add the idea that I might like stuff my friends like and you have another rich seem of potential products I would buy. My political views can be used to select lobbying ads e.g. for green sites, or left-leaning media outlets (I already read TreeHugger and The Guardian, but I'd love to know about special features they're doing). DVDs, books, films, websites, it's easy to learn a great deal about my preferences for all of them and yet its completely unused. Rumour has it that Facebook have poor clickthrough rates on their ads. No wonder! They should fire Microsoft tomorrow and build their own ad-serving platform. They would have no problem filling inventory, just look at the rush to build applications.

Instead it's guaranteed quick response credit card ads, mobile phone networks selling new handsets, drug companies trying to help me quit smoking. Little more than spam. Advertising revenue is the lifeblood of a social network, despite alternatives being pioneered chiefly by Bebo. There's an untapped pool there for somebody who can mine the profile information and turn into clickable ads for buyable products.

My particular favourite, and the ad that finally got me to write this all up, was an ad for a sexy dating site down the left of my profile page on Facebook. 100 pixels up and 400 pixels over you can read the text "In a relationship." Now who thought that ad was a good match?

Updated: Yahoo!'s new SmartAds system looks interesting.

Google is a fickle beast. I just noticed that my composite image of the Tour Eiffel (3mb JPEG) is the first result on a google.co.uk image search for that phrase.

Ran. Dom.

Had a bit of play with Django today, just messing around really. It's really good in some ways and a bit of a let down in others. For example the model and generic views is great, but I still have to write templates. Sometimes I even have to write form tags! Forms can be easily derived from the model. Django doesn't generate forms for you because it lets you control the presentation. Big whoop. I much prefer InfoCMS's method, give you a default presentation which is fairly simple and semantic HTML (i.e. divs with sensible class names) and then let you create XSLT templates to modify form presentation site-wide. This can be sticky if each form is different, but how often does that happen. Maybe you have big form and condensed sidebar form and a special case or two, but that should be OK if you write modular XSLT.

I might have to find a way to make the form generate-validate loop a bit more straightforward. The nice thing about Django is that the API is just below the surface, so it would be fairly easy to build this kind of functionality (I think). I'll probably never get rid of the templates though. This is mad, Django has this great model for plugging apps into sites. Make a new app, say a blog or a forum and you can have urls branching off the app base URI. Whether my blog is at /blog/ or /journal/ doesn't matter, the url patterns after that are the same either way. So someone else writes a forum module and a third person writes a simple wiki, I want these and my blog on one site that has a consistent look and feel. But the other guys have used different form HTML from me. I have to go through each of their templates and overwrite them! Great when the next update comes out and there's a tonne of new fields etc.

Nah that sucks. Django does have template inheritance, so all that's needed possibly is some agreed best practice for template layout. Always have a base template, a form template, etc, every app author uses these, knowing that the site admin can create their own localised versions with whatever HTML they like.

Pat Robertson, a US TV preacher (;-) called for the assasination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, on his 700 club TV show. This is not crazy enough on it's own. No no, he had to bring in the spectre of the pinko commies and wahhabists, accusing Chavez of turning Venezuela into "the launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism." This just defies belief really, but it's especially stupid when you consider that Robertson is head of an organisation that claims to have 2 million members in the US and was instrumental in getting Bush elected in at least one state.

Shamil Basayev emerges out of Chechnya like a primal force. From a region of such chaos, destroyed cities, horrific abuses of corrupt federals and terrible punishments exacted by rebels driven by a need for horrific revenge, he's a rock. He is a brutal, brutal man and a fascinating one. Starting out as a soldier, his real skill is for terror, he looms like a comic book supervillain, decimating the pro-Russian population of the north Caucasus and killing indiscriminately in hospitals and schools. He's an anachronism, seemingly keeping the second Chechen war going single handedly as all it's other leaders fall fowl to the steady pressure of the Russians.

But suddenly he's on TV. Channel 4 screened an interview with him in February, in the aftermath of Beslan. He responded to questions sent via middlemen. Now ABC has screened a face-to-face interview conducted by Andrei Babitsky, severely irritating the Russian government.

I find this a bit weird. He's a man who's existed in the middle of this kind of ball of chaos which is the mountains of the north Caucasus, lashing out against his enemies once in a while. He seems to have changed tack, at least temporarily, by working with the western media directly. Perhaps this is an attempt to raise his profile before another attack. He has already stated that he is planning more atrocities like Beslan.

The Russians have made a big cock up here. Their conduct in Chechnya has been abhorrent from the beginning. Stalin deported the entire nation to central asia, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis. The first and second wars are characterised by bitter and bloody fighting, with vicious human rights abuses on both sides (organ farming, kidnapping). The Russians have not been able to paint the clear-cut picture of Chechnya as home of Basayev the terrorist they would like because they themselves are at fault also. Now Basayev is exploiting that. Despite the fact that he is a terrorist by any definition, ABC calls him a guerilla, Channel 4's epithet was " jihadi warrior, philosopher, child-killer, freedom fighter."

On a related point, I read a very interesting piece on research into patterns in suicide bombings. The conclusion: that the vast majority of suicide bombings are conducted by occupied nations against their occupiers.

Perhaps Basayev fits this trend. Perhaps he really is a freedom fighter, just not a noble or a good one, one who is ruthless and barbaric. Though I'm not sure how our image of freedom fighters got so Hollywoodised any way. He said in the Channel 4 interview that if Russian troops leave Chechnya he will stand trial and accept punishment. This has to be the craziest blackmail ever and it's not really borne out. He was pretty much responsible for restarting the war in Chechnya after an unsteady peace by invading neighbouring Dagestan.

One thing's for sure, we'll be hearing more from Basayev. Another act soon? More public demands on the Russians? The mood amongst the Russian people has scarcely changed, Chechnya is and will always be part of Russia to them. Do we simply have to wait for Basayev to fall into one of the many traps set for him until this is over?

Two excellent articles on Basayev: Wikipedia and Sobaka's dossier.

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Last updated at 5:27, Thursday January 8th, 2009. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are GMT.

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