October 2000 Online Newsletter for Greater Essex County Computer Using Professionals

What do Professional Football referees and professional wrestlers have in common? No advertising. As I was watching my beloved Minnesota Vikings put the Detroit Lions away, the camera zeroed right in on the referee.  You can study him from head to toe and you won't find any swooshes or stylized mountains or designs containing stars.  It's a plain white cap (NFL logo on the back) and that's it.  Take a look at the garb on a professional wrestler and it's the same.  No advertising.  This is in stark contrast to the athlete or coaches who are adorned with the trappings of the profession which now contain the mandatory advertising in the form of visible logos.  The only place where it gets worse is motor racing.  On the side of Michael Schumacher's vehicle, you'll find advertisements for candy, petroleum, and even cigarettes provided the Grand Prix isn't raced in a country that prohibits the advertising of these things.  Then, the area where the advertising would be is even more intrusive in the way that it's censored. A great deal of Internet web pages have gone the same route.  At some sites, it's difficult to figure out just what the content of the site is supposed to be with all of the advertising and popup windows distracting the visitor from the actual content.  But, that advertising brings big money to the web page owner.  If you could just get the visitor to the site to click on one of those advertisements, you could actually steal the visitor from the site where she/he wants to be to another site designed to sell a product. The best advertisement designers spend their time designing advertisements that don't look like advertisements.  Recently, I went looking to download a shareware utility and noticed that there was a spot on the web page indicating that my web connection probably wasn't optimized.  And you know, if I could just optimize it, I could download that utility quicker.  Guess what?  It was almost a gotcha! These distractions pose problems for students who are in legitimate search for quality information.  One of the skills that must be developed is the ability to discern the difference between important content and misleading and intrusive advertising.  This task is not an easy one.  It does confirm the notion that time spent on the Internet for research needs to be directed towards the task at hand.  Blindly "surfing" with the hopes of finding something is not a good use of time online.  Using resources like the GECDSB Science and Technology or Social Studies, History, and Geography CD-ROM or the Student Reference Portal should serve as a start.  Webquests that are directed to the task at hand are pedagogically sound and similarly support the cause. There's enormous impetus for web sites to continue the quest for more advertising to get the Internet visitor to their site.  At another football game, I noticed that the aerial shots were courtesy of a DOT COM website that owned two blimps in California.  Ever wonder how many mouse clicks it takes to buy a blimp?