The Blogs Themselves

Can youimagine what it would be like, if everything on the internetstarted to look like this?  This Saturday, I didn’t have to imagine. It was everywhere I went on the web, thanks to a lovely little Browser Hijacker called Text-Enhance.

An unsubstantiated rumor that I grew up believing was that early radio dramas used to advertise products within the scripts of their shows.  A person would be in the middle of a storyline, and suddenly start talking about a given product as though they were in a commercial.  I googled the subject several times and found no relevant results, so I’m not certain this is accurate, but that makes the Text-Enhance world I thought I was living in all the more unprecedented and devious.  It doesn’t promise an eventual end to the situation.

Blogging is, in the scheme of things, still pretty new.  An advertisement that looks like a link in the text of a blog would undermine the blog, even if the ad was making money for the author, to say nothing of what it would be like if, say, Blogger started pocketing all of  the revenue from the insidious ads.  Technology is a brave new world, and I sometimes wonder if the dregs of the internet are more like pirates or immoral outlaws in the wild west.  Questions like “does a blog belong to the original owner” are not definitively answered by laws -- at least not yet [see here].  I can only hope that Blogger accounts would start disappearing, and that people would notify their readers of their plans to move their blogs over to createspace, like I was planning to do before I learned I was the victim of adware.  It’s still possible, though, that blogs like mine would simply disappear, and that the internet would become a place that serves no greater purpose than to sell people things.  Wouldn’t that be sad?  I promise my next post will be more science-related, for those of you who are disappointed that this one is not.