gl.:

I don’t have an issue with Amazon links across the board. The way you’re using them is certainly non-objectionable. You used the product in question as part of your business … that counts as a suitably transparent endorsement, I’d say.

For myself, when I’m thinking big about my blogging it’s usually in the form of doing more game or movie reviews or commentary. As a long-term question, I wonder (and it really is just wondering … I don’t know the answer) if my reviews would lose some integrity over time. And I wouldn’t be able to expect people to take the good reviews as seriously if they saw an attractive Amazon link arranged at the bottom.

I also wonder if there would be a transparent way to remedy the reasonable doubts visitors could be expected to have about the highest rated reviews. I guess the best thing to do would be to just write really awesome, thorough, well-reasoned reviews and expect people think for themselves. And maybe I’m overthinking it.

I like the way John Gruber handles a lot of his affiliate linking on Daring Fireball: He links to Apple hardware and software. We know he’s a total Mac partisan, so it’s not like he’s tilting reviews to get people to impulse click through his links. And it’s much more clearly positioned as “help me make something to run my site” and less as “Leopard 5 stars essential upgrade omg lol buyz!!1!!”

I guess in an ideal world, things like Amazon links would be more organic and in-line. I have a problem with them in the context of an alleged “review.”

OTOH, re: Gruber: I don’t like it when he comments on the products his ad sponsors are pushing. He mentioned getting an eval unit from one of his advertisers, and that struck me as problematic … free stuff AND the chance to curry favor with an advertiser.

http://stevenmansour.com/writings/2007/jul/23/2342/2504stepstoclosingyourfacebookaccount

Seriously though, I’m with you on basically all of this. I think that an unarticulated sense of fear-of-this-kind-of-bullshit is one of the things that keeps people who don’t do the Internet off the Internet.

What you just did to Facebook I did to gmail a month or two ago. I’m having the creeps about the proprietariness of OS X a lot lately, and I don’t have the experience of dealing professionally with the Linux Community to keep me from thinking about going Linux.

Sometimes I think it’d be a lot easier to be able to not worry or care about this stuff, but you can’t unthink thoughts.

I’m feeling less blasé about a number of things I was using without much thought even though I don’t care for the revenue model that keeps them free. Google Reader, Mail & search history for instance. They’re very nice and useful, but they’re also replaceable and they exist to harvest advertising and/or marketing data.

I talked myself into using stuff like that on the premise that it’s impossible to drop completely off the demographic data collection grid. I still think that’s probably true, but it’s always possible to minimize participation. The lower the profile, the less things to wonder and/or worry about.

I’d also toyed with setting up affiliate accounts to cover some of the (minor) expense of maintaining my hosting account. I think I’m probably not going to do that now. It seems like a slow road to becoming a salesman instead of some dude with a blog. I’d rather people who visit here have the sense that any enthusiasm I express is unalloyed by the hopes that they’ll follow an affiliate link.

i’m curious: what else did you talk yourself out of?

That’s a free-floating analogy. There are some viral marketing firms that do pay people to drop their product names by giving them free samples for doing so. The idea was that you’d get a case of Brand Z motor oil, use it, then make sure to mention it the next time you were on a road trip with your buddies and motor oil came up. That strategy was to be applied across many different brands in their appropriate contexts.

In terms of “the coffee shop that hears all,” that’s Facebook. It exists to see who you talk to, what you review and rate, and what people in your demographic like or don’t like. The new ad system (opt-out) keeps an eye on your activity in sites outside Facebook and tries to use your activity as a product endorsement in targeted ads for your friends.

The thing about it all is, you can opt out of much of that kind of thing, but I’m sick of wondering about how sticky my opt-out will be over time, whether I might not accidentally opt in to something I want no part of, and what happens with all these aggregates of information when they’re inevitably compromised.

Salesforce.com recently had a customer list taken, and all the customers on it were subjected to a targeted phishing attack that had them giving up passwords and other account information because the apparent source of the mail knew them as they presumed only Salesforce would.

Just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

I expunged my Facebook profile yesterday. Users aren’t able to completely delete their accounts. They can deactivate an account, but Facebook keeps the data they gave it. So I deleted all the apps I had installed in my profile, removed everyone from my friend list, overwrote all my personal data with either nothing or much less targeted information where it wouldn’t allow no answer at all, and dropped all my networks. Then I deactivated it. I have no idea how much information will be retained. The exercise’s value to me was just deciding that I get so little value from Facebook that there’s no way the privacy and personal security implications are worth it. Add in the creepy consumer surveillance angle, and there’s no sense in keeping an account active on it at all.

I don’t mind coming off a little bit crazed on all this. When I was standing there in the Ikea listening to those two women talk and I realized that it was easy for me to imagine that they could easily be some sort of marketing spectacle, it filled me with genuine disgust. Advertisers and marketers are turning our eyes and ears into their holes. They talk about “transparency,” but that’s largely limited to when they’re caught taking advantage of our increasingly naive desire to believe we’re participating in a social interaction that was not engineered by someone trying to part us from our money, attention or information for some corporate entity’s gain.

dot unplanned » The Things Make Us Stupid:I used to make a distinction between warm and cool voices … engaged vs. detached, involved vs. analytical…. Interested to the extent a quota demands significations of interest at the rate of n per day…