Time person of the year choice is interesting. 

Peoples choice was Julian Assange, the notorious anti-corruption whistle blower. The editors choice however was Mark Zuckerberg, who is not without controversy himself.

We all know the story of wikileaks founder Assange by now, and his precarious legal situation. The governments of nearly every country in the world are divided into either casting him as devil or saint. It takes no stretch of the conspiratorial imagination to posit that every dirty trick in the book is being thrown into getting him incarcerated. Wikileaks say they're doing it for the public good. Regardless of your views on the veracity of that claim, it's hard to argue against the intention. Wikileaks appears to be fighting corruption, even if you don't agree with how they go about it.

Zuckerberg received early funding from CIA venture capital wing. More precisely, facebook received early startup money from a branch of In-Q-Tel. Though an independant company, in the words of the CIA director: "CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them." Though facebook isn't publicly identified as one of part of their investment portfolio, it's fairly easy to follow the money, and this is precisely what many journalists and conspiracy theorists have done.

Links to the CIA have a dark conspiracy stigma at the best of times. Some have gone as far as to posit that facebook is a gigantic profiling network designed to spy on the worlds citizens. In effect it is, though probably for self interest rather than for the spooks. It's naive to think everything with a CIA link is sinister - I even have a CIA published app on my ipod. (The world factbook - a great reference.)

Facebook has become a part of our lives now, and being ubiquitous, doesn't seem so sinister. Still, on a monthly basis the company finds itself in trouble over various privacy issues and resale of data. Given it's approach to private information as currency of business value, it stands in stark contrast to Wikileaks approach to revealing secret data for the public good.

Recently Zuckerberg has been throwing money around at the public good himself. Bailing out the New Jersey school system and pledging half his wealth to charity are significant acts altruism.  Don't get me wrong here, Mark Zuckerberg is probably a nice guy at heart. Facebook is probably not entirely evil, though you can't be a billion dollar business without being a little bit evil - that's just statistics. Every bar of gold has it's impurities.

So this little rant isn't about if either Julian Assange or Mark Zuckerberg are either devils or saints. It's about Time Magazine's choice to choose Zuckerberg over the popular choice of Assange. Pundits are positing that the facebook founder would be a less controversial choice. Methinks they are mistaken. 

Just as governments (and notably the Swedish legal system) are drawing criticism for how they react to Assange and Wikileaks, Time Magazine will too. The controversy and conspiracy over wikileaks is now so hot that one becomes a part of it even by omission. The alternate of Zuckerberg may be the worst choice, as it's virtually perfect troll bait for conspiracy buffs, and sure to cause old facebook controversy to resurface in public discourse.

Government censure pressures on the press have been dangerously close to tripping over first amendment rights. Conspiracy buffs are already twitchy, and even the conservative press becomes radicalized under such pressures.

How will it effect public perception of this editorial decision? Only time will tell. :)

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I've been watching apple's strategy and they're doing some interesting things people hate lately. 

• iAds - a framework for doing advertising on the iPod/iPhone/iPad
• Safari 5 Reader - for clearing clutter from websites you're reading
• Not implementing flash on iDevices - to annoy Adobe and keep "stability"

Many folk are upset about all of these. Google feels they're locked out of apple's devices on the advertising front. Adobe on the platform front. Advertisers in general due to reader functionality. It looks like Steve Jobs is playing "our way or the highway" on all these fonts - like he wants to own the lot. I think it may be simpler than that.

Steve Jobs hates ads. He's got better things to do than be shouted at all day by advertisers. I tend to agree. So let's look at these recent developments though that lens.

NO FLASH

What to people do with flash?

• They play flash games a bit
• They watch video that is often already encoded in formats that don't need flash to watch them
• They get bombarded by the most obnoxious form of eye gouging, bandwidth sucking, animated advertising

So if flash was to disappear tomorrow we may miss Farmville, but not much else. For any utilitarian animation (infographics for instance) HTML5 will do fine in future. As for gaming there's Unity and a bunch of other quite reasonable alternatives. We won't miss the animated ads - advertisers will miss them. As for advertising itself... it'll just have to shout less.

If you're on a mobile device, with a mobile data plan, you'll probably save money too. You pay for those high-bandwidth shouty ads, when calm, low-bandwidth ads would do.

iAds

The iDevices were slow to take on multitasking. This may be for good reason. A misbehaved background application sucks battery, and that's an annoying thing in a mobile device. It also sucks other resources (such as cpu cycles), so the iPod would not have been nearly as successful as a gaming platform unless rogue background applications were reigned in. Now they DO have multitasking however... and it comes at a price. 

Any application which asks to sit in the background could potentially pop up something to alert you. This is where iAds comes in. Folk pay for ad free applications and services. Free applications and services often use advertising as a revenue model. This is fine on a single tasking system where only the app you're using can spam you. on a multitasking system, seemingly inactive applications can push advertising to you. This may not be so great.

Unless there's a framework in place to ensure the device user knows exactly why something has appeared on their screen, it's likely they'll blame the platform. So if popup ads suddenly appear out of nowhere, and nothing tells you where they come from, you may get rather frustrated. Any foreign advertising api could potentially do this.

So iAds is a framework to box in advertising and ensure it plays nice. I'm sure you'll hear it spun as another apple try at total market monopoly, but it's a framework. It'll reign in advertising on iDevices so it obeys familiar user interface conventions. When you see an ad, you'll know it's an ad, and why you're seeing it. This is important stuff. 

SAFARI READER

Ah the magic button that hides advertising - or does it. To use the reader button you wait for a web page to load first. Then if it's legible and non-shouty you just read it.... If however it's full of visual spam and your head feels like exploding, you hit the reader button and woosh, it becomes clean text. Now folk complain this hides advertising and rips sites of the money from their ad impressions.... but let's unravel that.

• You've already seen the ads - they didn't lose the money from those impressions
• You only bother to use reader if a website is obnoxious
• If you want to continue to browse the site you exit reader, and continue viewing any ads they show you
• If a website splits long articles into pages that are too short to read on their own in order to get more ad impressions, and is shouty, it deserves to lose subsequent impressions

I've been using tools like safari reader for a while now. I read a lot of stuff on the web for my work. Some sites are so full of visual noise that it helps to rip the articles out to a legible format to avoid distractions. Usually that's when there are bobbing bald heads or car crashes of flashing dollar signs happening in the side bar. It's not like I don't see their ads - I'm hyper aware of them enough to want to run away to a quiet corner and poke my eyes out with a pencil. These tools don't stop you seeing ads. They stop you from enduring them. They stop hideous ads from forcing you to click away from the site. 

MY DIRTY SECRET

I figure this isn't a war on advertisers, nor an attempt at monopoly. I figure it's all about keeping advertising sane. We killed the blink tag on websites long ago, only to replace it by the most heinous monster imaginable - animated popup advertising. Most of the internet bandwidth and computing power we use up browsing the web is eaten by this monster. But I've beaten the monster... it doesn't bother me any more. 

I filter just about all the advertising that comes into my machine. I hardly see any of it. That is my shameful secret - and I do feel bad about it. So bad in fact that, when I find a site useful or interesting. When it has good content. When it does stuff I want to support - good news sites, small developers, interesting blogs, great services and wotnot - I TURN ADVERTISING ON. When a site doesn't badger me like a shameful hussy, I drop the filter of trust and let that advertising into my life. I enjoy it's quiet background chatter. It ads color to the net. But when advertising mugs me, it gets a face full of mace.

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