{ 2005 12 13 }

Tuesday morning webclips

Source: Firefox users ignore online ads, report says | CNET News.com
If you look at this news in the light of yesterday’s post on the attempt by the telcos to hijack the Internet under the disguise of a “pay-for-performance marketplace”, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a situation in which MS (and online advertiser) money greases delivery channels so that IE users get their pages faster than the more discriminating FireFox users.

[A] German advertising technology company…, Adtech, found that during October and November, only 0.11 percent of Firefox users ever clicked on an ad, compared with around 0.5 percent of IE users. The percentage of IE users clicking on ads varied depending on which version of the browser was being used, the company said: from 0.44 percent of version 6.x users to 0.53 percent of version 5.5 users. The survey was based on 1,000 Web sites in Europe that use Adtech’s ad server.

Source: Salon.com Technology | How the World Works
Andrew Leonard is a bit skeptical of South Korean farmers’ anti-WTO activism. And, in the article immediately below this one, he’s more sanguine about the WTO than I’ve ever been. He’s a respectable analyst; it’s enough to raise my wariness about a knee-jerk liberal response to the WTO.

But one should be skeptical when anti-globalization activists point to the plummeting number of farmers in South Korea (from 6 million to 3.5 million over the last 12 years) as an example of the harm wrought by the WTO. During that same period, South Korea’s economy grew steadily. And one of the things that happens as countries develop, industrialize and achieve ever higher standards of living is that the proportion of farmers in the overall citizenry falls.

Posted by richard on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005, at 7:31 am, and filed under clip.

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