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Social Targeting: Are Advertisers Being Smart or Stalking You?
"Social" has always had a positive connotation to it, but with social targeting, I'll let you decide.
What is social targeting?
Social targeting is an advertising placement method used by online ad publishers that's based on your conversations and interactions in the social media space.
Ad publishers use data such as your status updates, tweets, photos and other online actions to help determine your interests and, therefore, determine the relevance of potential ads targeting you.
Social targeting also looks at your connections and the strength of your connections across certain networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Advertisers assume that people you are strongly connected with will share similar interests and then will target them with similar ads.
How social targeting works: An example
You go to a brand's website or Facebook page and buy a certain product, download something or sign up for a service. When your top friends (people you interact with most on your social networks) go online, they will see ads for the same products and services that you bought, downloaded or signed up for.
The idea is that, as Glen Calvert of Affectv says, "understanding what consumers are sharing, who the influencers are, and who they connected to, provides advertisers with an opportunity to reach consumers implicitly interested in their products, and discover new audiences based on their social connections."
Creative or creepy?
Making ads more relevant obviously makes a ton of sense. However, as someone who values privacy, I still get creeped out by targeting methods that use planted cookies to track me.
My preference is still semantic targeting—the cookie-less form of online ad placement—which I've discussed here before, most recently in The Consumer-Friendly Wave of Digital Advertising.
If you're not sure what semantic targeting is, read more of what I've said in Catch the Wave, the Third Wave of Digital Advertising.
But, I don't want you to take my word for it. Let me know what you think. How do you feel about being tracked on the web and having that data being used by advertisers?


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New Bern High School students gearing up to go to the prom Saturday got a stark reminder Friday morning of what they can lose if they party with booze.
New Bern High School students gearing up to go to the prom Saturday got a stark reminder Friday morning of what they can lose if they party with booze.
Almost the whole student body filed out of the school to view results of a mock collision between two cars in the front entrance roadway and the drama associated with the staged teen death of freshman Caroline Frenia.
Frenia isn�t really going to the prom, which is at the Sudan Shrine Temple, but she is a member of Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD).
Her drama date and the driver of the white Mitsubishi in which she would have been a passenger, was Josh McMunn, a red-headed sophomore in a bright yellow Steelers T-shirt, who was led off by New Bern police in handcuffs for his part as someone driving while impaired (DWI).
Bridgeton EMS first responders extricated Frenia from the car and wrapped her in a sheet. Then, they symbolically took her by ambulance to the morgue as Cotten Funeral Home employees in black suits waited nearby with a hearse for special effect.
Kim O�Connor, the innocent but injured occupant of the blue vehicle struck and overturned in the mock event, was taken to an EastCare chopper that landed on the school band practice field.
E & J Fleet Management provided the cars for the exercise with New Bern Fire Department and law enforcement agencies including New Bern Police Department, Craven County Sheriff�s Department and Jones County Sheriff�s Department.
New Bern Police MPO3 William Zirby was the hands-on coordinator for the event encouraged by prom supervisor Mary Anne Lingman and, along with school resources officers, for organizing Bern High School SAAD about two months ago. It now has just about a dozen members.
Cynthia Pettis is president of that SADD group also including Te�Onna Jones, Kristin McOwen, Jasmyne Metters, Alexis McMunn, Stephanie Zapata, Taylor Mills, Alexis Chapin and DeOnna Bryant.
�We did this because prom weekend is here and we�d like people to remember that making stupid decisions like drinking and driving can kill you or someone else and is hard on the community,� she said.
SADD vice president Jason Wood said, �We hope this will teach people what can happen when you make destructive decisions.�
EastCare�s David Short told group members, �Hopefully y�all learned something today. Spread the word.�
New Bern Fire Department Lt. Tony Roberg said, �We�ve responded to several traffic fatalities in the last few months, not all due to drinking and driving, but we�re trying to teach kids this is what could happen if you drink and hopefully it will prevent it.�
According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), in 2010, 389 or 29 percent of North Carolina motor vehicle deaths were attributed to people driving while impaired. The percentage went up but the total number went down in 2011 when 365 alcohol-related traffic deaths were reported or 30 percent of all traffic deaths in the state that year.
NBHS students Yasmine Artis and Ronnie Lovick plan to have a good time Saturday but without alcohol.
�I don�t drink anyway,� said Lovick. �But, yea, some of my friends will drink.�
Kris Peck and Sharon Fagan are also going to the prom and both said they know some people will drink but they don�t plan to drink before, during or after the event.
Fagan said she knew a young man killed by a drunk driver and has seen and felt the hurt it causes.
Peck said, �We�re going to a friend�s house after the prom and parents will be there. It will be a good safe environment.�
The vivid portrayal of the potential consequences of what can happen if kids do choose to drink included Angela Shelters, mother of senior Brian Resop, who said she � just came to watch,� running to the car aghast, screaming, �Oh, no. Not my baby, my baby.�
�I think it will scare some into submission; change some minds,� Peck said of the event.
Nina Vukicevic said, �I know not to drink and drive but this makes it clearer. Hopefully, my friends won�t do anything stupid.�
�It sets in more than someone just saying �don�t do it,�� said Alison Wynn.
New Bern Police Chief Toussaint. E. Summers Jr. said, �This shows the importance of how alcohol and drugs can devastate families and to remind young people this weekend to stay away from alcohol and drugs.�
Sue Book can be reached at 252-635-5665 or firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow her on Twitter@SueJBook.

subset: commoncrawl


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Did you hear that?
Most of my time taking care of patients is spent in the intensive care unit, which is really just one snap judgment after another. It was in the ICU that I met a guy I'll call Mr. Jones, and his amazing family. I can't recall his real name at the moment, and it would be illegal for me to tell you what it was, anyway.
Mr. Jones had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer just a few short weeks before I met him. I couldn't imagine that this came as a surprise to his family. He had smoked dozens of cigarettes every day for many years, and over the last few months he had gone from skinny but relatively healthy to emaciated. His color was awful, sallow and almost grey. His hair was lank and obviously had been falling out, not from chemotherapy but simply from not eating enough to keep up with the calorie demands of the voracious tumor that had spread through his body. Worst of all, the cancer wasn't just in his lungs. It had spread to his brain, the highest of high-rent districts in the body, and he had what we in medicine would call "a huge goombah" in the back part of his brain.
If this sounds bad, it was, but even this wasn't enough to land him in the ICU. No, he'd been admitted to the hospital for what looked like a pneumonia, and he was getting worse. The plan had been to try to get him over his infection and help him get some nutrition and some strength back, and then the neurosurgeons would consider opening his skull and trying to cut out the part of his brain that had been eaten by the cancer. As he got worse and was moved to the ICU, though, this plan was put on hold.
Shortly after arriving in the ICU, it became clear that we would need to put a breathing tube in Mr. Jones's throat and put him on a mechanical ventilator to maintain a safe level of oxygen in his blood. This is a major deal, full-on artificial life support. For me, it's standard practice to discuss the pros and cons of such a maneuver with a patient or his or her family, particularly when that person has an incurable condition – say, lung cancer that's spread to the brain – or is likely to die fairly soon. It was under these circumstances that I met Mr. Jones's family – his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson, a big chunk of the Jones clan. I explained that he was getting worse, and that we were at the point where we'd be needing to put a breathing tube in, and had he ever talked about his wishes about ventilators or CPR or any of that. Despite being folks of modest means and even more modest education, the Joneses were canny in the way that so many folks from the rural South are – they had livin' smarts. They understood that my question was code for, "He's probably going to die, and since he already had an incurable cancer, you might want to think about not putting him through all of that." They were pissed! His wife got right up in my face, looking as thin and haggard as he did and reeking of cigarettes, and explained that her husband was a fighter, a proud VETERAN, and that he was not going to roll over and give up. She growled her thoughts about the incompetence of the neurosurgeons through clenched teeth, and why hadn't they operated WEEKS AGO.
"Ma'am, I'm sure they didn't want to do anything that might hurt hi…."
I asked if she understood what his disease meant, if anyone had explained it to her. Big mistake. She explained that she wasn't stupid, that yes she knew exactly what was going on, and that no, we weren't going to talk no more about what we would or wouldn't do. I was to do everything possible to save her husband's life, no matter what. "He can't die." So I went into his room, said a silent apology to him, and gave him the drugs to put him to sleep so that I could put a breathing tube in him and hook up the ventilator. It was only a few hours after that that we were once again in his room, draping him to create a sterile field so that we could put a very large tube in his jugular vein to give medicines to fight his infection and to keep his blood pressure up in a range compatible with life. He was in shock and getting worse by the hour.
Things stabilized a bit. He settled out, and his family settled in. Over the next couple of days, I got to know them and I got to know him. They were exhausted and heartbroken. The cancer HAD been a surprise to them. Of course it had. No one goes around thinking their loved one has a terminal disease. They struggled with the unfairness and the indignity of it, as so many people do. Why had he gotten so bad so fast? Why hadn't the neurosurgeons operated on him? Mr. Jones had been a tough-as-nails soldier in Vietnam, but he also made jewelry. A cross he had made hung from the ventilator on a beaded chain he had strung himself. His son had followed in his footsteps and was currently stationed in Iraq. He knew his dad was sick, and the paperwork for emergency leave had been filled out, but who knows with the military?
It was 4 o'clock in the morning on his third day in the ICU. My pager went off. Mr. Jones's heart rate had precipitously dropped, then rocketed up, then swung back down. His blood pressure had plummeted. Worst of all, he was no longer triggering breaths on the ventilator. It was doing all of the work for him, his vital functions now completely supported by machines. A scan of his head confirmed the worst. He had bled into his brain, into the middle of the tumor. The pressure inside his head was immense, and no surgeon on earth could save him. He was, for all intents and purposes, brain dead. When his family arrived that morning, they saw the stricken look on my face right away. Poker has never been my game. I explained what had happened, and that there was nothing to fix this. I explained that we really needed to think about stopping the aggressive life support, because we were only prolonging his death. His wife came apart, and explained that their son had been granted approval for emergency medical leave and would be coming Stateside soon, but that because he was coming from an active warzone, they could not be told when exactly he was leaving or would arrive.
I struggled not to weep right along with them, and we came up with a plan. Keep the ventilator going. Stop all the other medications. No CPR, no heroics. When God wanted him, God would take him, and none of us would do anything to stand in the way. Even as my heart ached along with the Joneses, the medical science part of my brain knew that we were probably talking hours, a day at most. He would have a cardiac arrest, or his blood pressure would drop and he would just… shut down. Medical science is pretty good, and his blood pressure did drop, to a level that is incompatible with life (50/30, for those of you out there who are curious). But he didn't shut down. His heart rate stayed steady. The ventilator chugged away, chuffing 14 times a minute no matter what. He continued to pee, despite the fact that there was no conceivable way his kidneys were getting any bloodflow at all. Still, no movement, no cough, no twitch, no nothing otherwise.
This went on for two days. I just knew he was going to stop at any moment, except he didn't. His family asked questions that I tried to answer, though with less and less certainty every day. We were off the map here. Then, Mrs. Jones's cellphone rang. Her son was at the airport and would be making his way to the hospital shortly. This was great and awful news. His father was still alive, but we all knew that not long after this young man arrived and told his father good-bye, we would be stopping the ventilator, and he would be gone in minutes.
But that's not what happened. As I was anxiously awaiting the son's arrival, preparing to meet this young man whose family I had already grown very close to and under these incredible circumstances, my pager beeped to life. A patient was in the emergency room in shock and needed to come to the ICU right away. I gave the go-ahead to bring him on up, and he arrived within minutes. The team got to work immediately… just as Mr. Jones's son arrived. I shook his hand briefly, apologized profusely for having to rush off, and turned him over to his mother. "Well, at least they'll have a little more time together while I work on this other guy," I thought. Wrong again. I can only relate the facts of what happened next as they were told to me. The son walked into his father's room. He leaned down and said, "It's okay, Dad. I'm here." Within 90 seconds, Mr. Jones's heart rate slowed to nothing, then stopped. Even before the nurse peeked her head into the new patient's room to whisper to me that Mr. Jones was gone, I knew. Somehow, this brain dead man had waited for his son, had heard that it was okay even when he shouldn't have been able to hear anything, and then he left.
The Jones family came back several weeks later, to thank everyone for everything. There were hugs and tears and promises that they would all take care of each other. I remembered how angry and hurt they all had been, and marveled still at the healing that had already taken place. I can't explain Mr. Jones's death with science. It simply wasn't a scientific thing. But I know what I saw, and I know that Mr. Jones's snap judgment taught me more about the art of medicine and about the magic of everyday life than any textbook or lecture or scientific journal ever will.


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Cisco Takes Next Steps Toward High-Intensity Collaboration
At Enterprise Connect in March, we announced a number of collaboration innovations, including a new telepresence concept called high-intensity collaboration. High-intensity collaboration describes a meeting environment where people can interact with content in ways not previously possible during a telepresence meeting, while still maintaining the highest degree of visual immersion. These features include the ability to annotate on content, move content to any of the three main screens, share content from multiple sources, and whiteboarding on the big screens (future software development).
In March, we unveiled the Cisco TelePresence TX9000 Series, our next-generation, fully immersive room-based system. At the time, we previewed new features, with a promise that high-intensity collaboration would be fully realized over the next 18-24 months. With the soon-to-be released TX 6.0 software update, we're about to deliver on some of these exciting new capabilities across the TX9000 and TX1300 product lines, our triple-screen and single-screen immersive systems, respectively.
Annotation is the first of the high-intensity collaboration features to become available. It allows customers to annotate on the 12 inch user interface for the TX Series (Touch 12), and have it appear on the main display screen. Annotation, along with other TX 6.0 updates, will be delivered in the second half of this year and will be available to TX Series customers with existing service contracts. Over time, we expect future features to deliver even more powerful visual impact.
The TX 6.0 software update also delivers a number of new enhancements to the TX9000 and TX1300 Series, including 1080p60 video, 1080p30 content sharing and Medianet intelligence. Where competitive systems force customers to choose between video and content quality, the TX9000 customers can offer both simultaneously with three streams of high-definition (HD) video and one stream of full HD data. Cisco offers the best video and content quality of any product on the market with no sacrifice because of a fourth codec built into the TX9000.
The TX series is Medianet-enabled which allows the TX Series to support media tracing and metadata. With Media tracing, the network can trace the path of video data packets from TX Series endpoints for troubleshooting and network performance optimization. Metadata allows the marking of video traffic traversing the network which helps provide analytics so network managers can prioritize and allocate bandwidth for the greatest efficiencies. Medianet intelligence will assist customers to provide the best video experience possible for their users.
We've also made making telepresence calls easier. We've added the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) dialing feature to this latest TX 6.0 release. This feature allows users to have a name-based video address versus a number, which is a key usability enhancement for customers and provides a consistent addressing schema across the Cisco TelePresence product portfolio. Finally, we've added ten more languages to the previously English-based Touch 12, which is great news for our global customer base.
Stay tuned as we continue to roll out new products to support high-intensity collaboration.
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2 Comments
Mark Okern
Will these features / updates be available on current CTS units that have Touch controllers?
Loving the idea of full 2 way collaboration via the inTouch. I hope you're also working on similar functionality for my EX60 too.
In the mean time, the document camera & my trusty set of coloured markers will do the trick!


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Rand Paul: Stop Egypt aid
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday introduced legislation that would cut off foreign aid to Egypt following last week's military ousting of President Mohamed Morsi.
Paul has made several comments throughout the week insisting that the events in Egypt constitute a military coup and has criticized the Obama administration for its commitment to continue providing foreign aid to the country.
Story Continued Below
The United States is forbidden by law to give aid to countries where a military overthrow of a democratically elected government has occurred. The administration has maintained, however, that the events in Egypt do not constitute a coup.
"By the President's refusal to call the situation in Egypt a 'coup' and continuing the flow of foreign assistance to Egypt, he is forthrightly saying 'I am ignoring the rule of law,'" Paul said in a statement.
Paul's bill is the first legislation in Congress directly addressing the matter, but several other senators — most notably Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — have expressed the belief that the U.S. should withhold aid to Egypt.
Members of Congress in both chambers, however, are split over the upheaval. While some have called for an end to military aid to Egypt, others like House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have lauded the action as occurring "on behalf of the citizens."
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama ordered a review of the U.S. aid given to Egypt, but the administration has maintained that the U.S. would not take sides.


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One Year
I think several regular and semi-regular readers are on vacation this week, but still I will give you a one time opportunity. I have spouted my opinions here week after week and I have asked for your opinions on a number of occasions. So now you can ask me any question you like, go ahead ask.


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Selling the Good Life on the Great Plains
Small County in Kansas Touts Activities, Incentives to Lure Residents and Avoid Rural Woe of Population Decline
TRIBUNE, Kan.—Shayelyn Cooper traded the suburbs of Denver for the least-populated county in Kansas, drawn here by a new job in nursing and money to pay off her college loans.
The 25-year-old never pictured herself in a town where the closest Wal-Mart is 60 miles away and the busiest intersection is a blinking light. But less than a year after moving to Greeley County, Ms. Cooper is finding she's a small-town girl after all.