Online Marketing, or The Hymn of Acxiom

As I’ve gotten more and more into the professional side of blogging over at Crazy Together, I’ve learned surprisingly little about advertising. Google AdSense is pretty easy to set up for your own website, but you don’t really learn much about how those ads are chosen for display on your site. I’ve actually learned more about advertising from a song by Vienna Teng called The Hymn of Acxiom.

I adore this song on its own, but its even more interesting when you learn that it is about internet marketing. [Nerdy side note, the cover of the album is a heat map of population shifts in the Metro Detroit area, where I live.] Acxiom may sound like a made-up word for the song, but Acxiom is a real company.

Computer: Tell Me About Speech Recognition

All nerds above the age of 20 probably remember thinking how cool it would be to have the computer in Star Trek: TNG because you could talk to it and it would understand you.   And now we have those computers . . . sort of.

Unmanned Aircraft: My Suggested Privacy Analysis

I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot in the news lately about “drones” and that the police will use them to spy on you and that the President might use them to kill unsuspecting Americans. Crazy political rhetoric aside (meaning the killing of unsuspecting Americans), these unmanned aircraft are real and there are serious questions on how they’re going to be used and the regulation of their use.  I thought it would be interesting to look at the problems that can arise with integrating new technology and illustrating some of the issues we will be facing in the future as a society.