Eco-friendly bags

It seems that the environment is the topic on everybody’s mind. Advertising agencies have been watching this trend and adapting to it. Think for example the Whole Foods Eco-Friendly shopping bag. Shoppers go to Whole Foods for the “organic and healthy” vibe. They want to leave feeling good about what they have bought. What better way to feel good about yourself, than doing something eco-friendly. Whole Foods gives out the woven bags to each of its shoppers in an effort to reduce the amount of wasted paper and plastic. The shoppers can reuse these bags over and over. The bag proudly proclaims the Whole Foods logo for everyone to see. People reuse their Whole Foods bags frequently giving it better publicity. Other stores have also caught on to this trend. Even in Rice Village, boutiques like Hemline have been sporting the ecofriendly advertisements. Hemline goes a step further and says if you bring your bag back the next time you shop, you will receive ten percent off of your purchase. This is a great marketing strategies because if encourages the shopper to hold on to their bags, a constant reminder of the store. Others will see the bag, appreciate the store’s concern for the environment, and maybe next time, shop their themselves.

Browsers & the Web, part 5: The Need for $$

Please comment at my blog.

One of my favorite acronyms must be invoked here: TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There’s a price behind everything, especially in the tech world (and free/open-source software is no exception). I would like to give a shameless plug for donating to FOSS developers and explain the costs behind using the web.

FOSS developers are awesome, awesome people to me. They, for various personal reasons that are often not monetary, spend lots of their time creating, maintaining, and improving the universe of software that is FOSS. They work on projects from operating systems (Linux and Unix) to databases (MySQL, SQLite) to programming languages (Python), PHP, Perl) to web servers (Apache) to web software (Drupal-powers EmeryCentral, WordPress, phpBB) to word processing (OpenOffice and Abiword) to photo editing (the GIMP). There are FOSS applications in every domain that there is a need in (including niches such as amateur radio). The quality of the work is so good for much of the software that it surpasses anything else produced commercially, and thus the operating system and web server that power most of the Internet and the hardware that runs it (Linux and Apache) are community-built, as well as many of the web software tools that let you utilize the Web. My simple plea is that you occasionally donate $5 here and there to the projects that have allowed the Web to flourish and grow with the freedom and pace that it has.

(Readers familiar with developing and deploying websites should skip ahead)

For anyone who does not know what expenses go into making a website or developing FOSS software (which is done using the Internet to coordinate team members spread all over the globe), this is to give you a basic overview. To have a website, you obviously need a server) connected to the Internet. You will usually pay to have a server located in a datacenter with hundreds or thousands of other servers and powerful air conditioning and multiple redundant power sources and Internet connections, or you may share space on a server with other users using virtualization. Web-hosting space is available from $5 a month upwards, but to have a site support thousands or tens of thousands of views a day quickly becomes expensive because of the amount of work the server needs to do and the amount of bandwidth) that is needed.

To cover expenses that are inevitably incurred, sites (be they homepages for a FOSS project, a blog, a news site, or any other site) will pursue a number of solutions that will be discussed in my next post: advertising and subscription services.

Who cares about the product?

Are advertisers trying to manipulate the viewers or do they legitimately care about their product and want to see it sold, because it deserves to be? These days, there are so many incentives for advertisers to make catchy, creative advertisements. In many companies, advertising is a huge part of the budget. AT&T spends over 565 million dollars in three months. Is that overcompensating for something? If the product was superior, wouldn’t it sell itself? Another incentive is The Clio Awards, a major, global competition for advertising, design, and interactive. They receive over 19,000 entries ranging from billboards, posters, radio, television, student entries and more. People have been participating in this ceremony for decades. It seems as though the quality of the product is becoming less and less important and the quality of the advertisement has overshadowed it.

To see how much other companies pay for advertising click here. (I hope that link works )

Commercials Interference

There are penalties in football such as pass interference that are severe penalties, and piss every fan off when they occur against their team. Commercial Interference pisses me off. Multiple times during the broadcast of a sporting event entire plays are missed and their is no excuse for that. People turn in to ABC or NBC to get solid coverage and watch a decent broadcast of a football game. In the United States, and In Zach’s life, football is important. If I am watching a game I want to see every play. I do not want to miss any action. I do not pay money for fantasy football, game tickets, and trading cards to miss player’s performances.

Now, I understand what is missing a few five second plays going to hurt when broadcasting companies can make an extra commercial? Well would you want to miss this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtszXrC0R0

I missed that play during a Saturday afternoon. When my friends and I were scrolling the channels for a good game, We came across the Georgia game. Who did we want to watch? Knowshon Moreno. We missed his best play because a commercial for AIG was airing. That’s what you get.

This mistake occurs multiple times each game, and sometimes no replay is shown. Fortunately, Emery games are not televised so no one misses a play.