Re: ::scr Marketing, Spam, Whatever

[celia romaniuk <space@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Simon Batistoni wrote:

> But may I just add that my mind still boggles as to who would
> actually sign up for a service, or pay for something they'd been
> tricked into visiting, though.

Well, I think that most people wouldn't. But some may decide they like the
idea of it, so sign up. Maybe banner ads share with Direct Marketing a
very low expected response rate.
 
> Hmm. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I was
> watching TV and reading a book at the same time. And I think what
> those of us who claim to be able to do several tasks at once really
> do is the same as a lot of older multi-tasking OSes. Basically, we
> keep 'rotating' the tasks in our mind, allotting a little time to
> each one, so that our attention is only actually on one task at one
> time. I even noticed that I was "buffering" the sound from the TV
> whilst I read a sentence, and only really processing the words
> afterwards.

Hm. Well, like I said, I can't really remember how it works. But I googled
around a bit, and this might be interesting. 

http://www.alleydog.com/cognotes/attention.html

Oh, a fairly important thing is that if you become very used to doing
certain things then you can do them more or less automatically. That's a
very important part of Raskin's thesis in the book I mentioned in the last
post:  if you make things consistent and simple then people are
more likely to be able to them automatically, and save their brain for
more complex issues (e.g. sorting out the accounting problem rather than
wondering why Excel won't do $foo).
 
> But this is voluntary, and I think the reason we won't "multi-task"
> within a web page in order to read the banners is because we get no
> benefit from doing so, and they're not part of the information which
> we currently want to access. Maybe.

Or that we're already multitasking: we're reading IRC, looking at four 
sites in separate windows, talking to our boss, listening to music and 
writing an email. And breathing. 
 
-- 
celia