The Brian Manley

I hate advertising. Hate it. And it’s not because I’m not interested in what services or products are available. Got an interesting gizmo, doo-dad or jeejaw, and I’ll be the first in line to pick one up. The problem with advertising is that advertisers take a shotgun approach to targeting. This is especially true in television, where targeting seems to be focused on age or gender and not much else. The web is a bit better in that sites often have a much narrower demographic than, say, the latest NBC sitcom.

Still, this is a scattershot approach. Just because I’m on your site doesn’t mean I fit your demographic. For example, I just pulled up the site for the FOX show “House”. The advertisement was for Windows 7. I use a Mac. The main FOX site shows ads for AT&T. I already have AT&T. Those bits and my attention where just wasted because FOX (or its advertising network) attempted to guess what I wanted. Or, maybe they didn’t guess at all. Either way, it was opportunity lost for the host and the advertiser.

A better approach would be to actually ask me what I’m interested in. Then ONLY hit my eyes with advertising that appeal to my specific interests. This is what I call Consumer Specified Advertising.

These interests might be general (gadgets, for example) or specific and time limited (vacations to Mexico in May). They might even vary during the time of day, or my current location. For example, if I’m working from my work computer, an advertiser might try to focus ads related to my work interests. While at home, I could receive ads for interests related to hobbies, etc.

Doing this on a site-by-site basis won’t scale of course. If I have to enter advertising preferences on every web site I frequent, I won’t do it. But if I could provide that information to a central location and let sites know about that location when I visit their pages, then it wouldn’t be such a chore. Additionally, my preferences can follow me to ever site I visit. By doing this, I hopefully never see another ad for mortgages or cruises when I’m not likely to purchase such an item.

So, here’s how I believe something like this could work:

1. Create a online service where I can store my preferences. My preferences consist of words chosen from a controlled vocabulary or loose folksonomy of topics. Each of these preference items are represented by a URL, which when resolved returns a list of synonyms or similar terms to the preference value I’ve set.
2. Serve my preference values from a single URL. Perhaps my preferences can be found at http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley. Fetching that URL returns my list of preferences and some number of similar terms. Alternately, if I have a web site of my own, I can simply host a file containing my preferences there.
3. Tell my browser where my preferences URL can be found. Using a plugin of some sort, configure my browser to include a HTTP header that indicates where my preferences URL is. For example, a header such as “CSA-Profile: http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley”. The browser should then, for every request I make, include that header.
4. Implement, on the server, a method to fetch my preferences URL, extract the preferences I’ve set and then find advertising that matches those preferences.
5. Profit!

It’s easy to see how you could also extend this in several ways. For example, including a list of my friends; their preferences can be fetched and used to enhance my own since we’ll probably have similar interests and tastes. Also, let me “announce” in my preferences what I’ve bought so that advertising for accessories, refills, whatever could be shown to me.

Yes, there are issues. How do you get people to opt-in to something like this? Is the promise of better advertising enough? You also need to get content providers to buy in and either partner with an ad network or create your own. Not a weekend project, for sure.

Now, somebody get cracking on this so I don’t have to see another stupid home mortgage ad ever again!

Desk clutter drives me insane. In theory, I could hide most of the the things ON my desk by putting them UNDER my desk. But for most things on my desk, that’s not practical. I need to see it, fidget with it, put a disk in it, watch the lights on it, etc.


So I came up with the idea of attaching a shelf to my monitor(s) on which I could place stuff. I built a prototype, but the build quality sucks and it’s less than attractive. Nevertheless, it works pretty well. I can put my XBox, my PS2 and a Roku player on top of a 26″ LCD television with no problem.


I think this is actually a marketable idea, but as usual, I don’t have the time or interest in actually trying to build a business out of it. So if you’re so inclined, please steal this idea, bring it to market and make a bunch of money. Just be sure to send me some for free!


Okay, so here’s the thing: Mount a bracket to the VESA mount found on most if not all monitors and televisions. To this bracket, attach a set of telescoping extensions arms; one going up to support the shelf, and one going down to add support. Slap a shelf-like surface on the top of the upward moving extension arm. Profit!

I forget stuff. For example, I forget that this blog is here and that I should post something once in awhile. But I also forget important things; did I take my medicine? What did I eat yesterday before my headache started? How many cigarettes did I smoke today? Have I paid the mortgage this month? Who’s this person in this picture? What did I accomplish at work this week? You get the idea…

Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) didn’t seem to have this problem. He simply wrote down or filed away everything into a giant compendium of his life which he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. “Dymaxion”, because he seemed to give everything that name. And “Chronofile”, because the files were created and kept in chronological order. Get it?  Anyway, every fifteen minutes Bucky would note in a journal what he was doing or feeling or did or was about to do. His was probably the most documented life ever lived. If stacked, the pages would be 270 feet tall.

Vannevar Bush proposed a machine, the “memex”, so solve this sort of problem for people like me (and you). Writing for the Atlantic in 1945, his article “As We May Think” proposed a wonder-desk that would store, catalog, classify and retrieve all the information that we generated or acquired as part of our day to day lives. This would be done “simply by the clever use of relay circuits”. Uh, right. Not in 1945 you ain’t.

Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) at Microsoft Research picked up on these ideas several years ago and decided to take a stab at documenting his life also. Box by box, he began scanning documents and photos, creating complicated directory structures and file naming conventions, recording phone calls, every email, means, biometric information, location information, etc. This “lifelogging” project and the resulting software tools were dubbed MyLifeBits, and is the subject of his book “Total Recall”. Oddly, he seems to have omitted any mention of Buckminster Fuller, but does tip his hat to Bush several times.

Total Recall is a fine book, if a bit light on the implementation details. Bell spends most of his time creating use cases and then demonstrating how situations can be improved when an “e-memory” is available to assist us. His scenarios include the typical office worker, health care, education, memorials, etc. Bell also considers the negative ramifications of storing everything. Obviously, if you store it, you can loose it or someone can steal it. Certainly privacy and security are issues when dealing with e-memory systems. We should probably spend some time figuring out the legal framework that will protect (or not) your life’s data. But I guess we’ll cross that road when we get to it. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might check out Robin Williams in “The Final Cut”, where all sorts of thorny issues surrounding e-memories are explored.

So while I’m convinced that storing everything is generally a good idea for us, society and future generations, I’m stuck on the implementation. When so much of our information is scattered among dozens of applications, devices and web sites, how could it be tracked, cataloged, annotated, archived and searched? A giant bucked of data in the cloud to which all your stuff is dumped? Distributed data stores that are crawled by software agents to gather information and synchronize it? Some hybrid approach?

This is fun stuff to day dream about. And I’m tempted to actually do some development of small tools to help bootstrap my own e-memories. What about you? If you could save everything, would you? Why, or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts…