Shortly after Nottingham City Council presented at the Google local government conference last year and announced their £15K windfall from AdSense, I took a close look at their site to see what kinds of ads were being served and how they were presented.
Variously, I found numerous ads that seemed to act against the direct interests of the council, preyed upon some of the most vulnerable local residents or were just downright sleazy or inappropriate.
Do you remember when film photography was ubiquitous and consumer digital cameras were just starting to come onto the market? (Worryingly, there will be readers of this blog that won’t.)
At the time, there was any amount of commentary from the tech boosters who said that of course digital photography would supplant film soon enough. Meanwhile the naysayers trotted out a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be trading in their “real” cameras for these second-class substitutes and couldn’t see why anyone would.
I don’t need to tell you how that one worked out, but let’s look at the process by which this happened.
