Catching up

Back from holiday (since Monday in fact, but I've been busy), and lots of interesting things have happened:

The Adpocalypse (Bubblegeneration) is upon us. Two and a half million people (RoughType) have decided they'd rather not bear the nuisance costs of poorly-targeted online ads and downloaded a simple Firefox ad-blocking extension. It took two days (Adverlab) for YouTube's new InVideo ads to suffer the same fate from another Firefox extension, TubeStop. Further research  via Paidcontent shows that most UK DVR owners skip most ads (and also buy fewer DVDs). This looks to me like the moment when a behaviour that was limited to the early technology adopters (alright, geeks) went mainstream and the mass audience realised it could turn its collective back on irrelevant interruptions.

Second Life has its own stock exchange (TechCrunch) - perhaps the ultimate emerging market opportunity, though for my money the interesting commercial opportunities are within Eve Online (long term) and WoW (short term) and what the metaverses need is a interworld exchange for businesses whose assets exist within the various virtual worlds.

Google has been busy patenting many things, notably a potential mobile web killer ap in a mobile payments solution as well as peer-to-peer ads

Lots of people were entertainingly caught out by the Wikipedia scanner

FakeSteveJobs had one of the best rants in recent months about the end of the scarcity model for media

Finally, Scott Adams has been pimping the excellent new Basic Instructions web comic - they're generally pretty good, but this one had me in stitches