Life & Research Notes

This past weekend I threw together an update to Kate and Annie’s Clickback project from the January Organic Marketing build-a-thon. I wrote it in ruby/rails, using acts_as_authenticated and acts_as_attachment, plus a couple of newer features like RJS, as well as Geoffrey Grossenbach’s sparklines package.

Like Kate and Annie’s original, the system provides a mechanism by which viewers can offer feedback on advertisements via a simple +/- voting system. Each vote then affects the likelihood of that ad subsequently displaying for that publisher. This feedback option is a simple but fundamentally different idea, and it makes sense from the media consumer, publisher and advertiser perspectives. Advertisers get feedback from consumers, and through the feedback their ads naturally tend to display on pages where they are most positively received. The plus/minus scores act as a fitness measure for each ad within a particular publisher space. Site owners and publishers ensure that only the most relevant ads appear on their site, not via some hip premier system, but collectively by the community members themselves. Finally, individual consumers and viewers see the ads that are likely the most relevant to their own interests, and they have a chance to participate in the ad selection process.

Inspired by Google’s AdSense, I designed the inclusion code for publishers to be extremely simple. Including an ad is as easy as signing up and then inserting a short snippet javascript customized to use the publisher’s id. The viewers do the rest.

<script type="text/javascript">
clickback_ad_publisher = "brent";
clickback_ad_width = 728;
clickback_ad_height = 90;
clickback_ad_channel ="";
clickback_frame_border = 1;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://panoramic.media.mit.edu:3000/show_ads.js" >
</script>

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