Surfs the web randomly when you're away generating
useless
consumer data for all those little cookies that ride your
browser like so many remoras, ticks or fleas. The name
comes from chaff, pieces of aluminum foil that bombers
would drop during WW2 to spoof German radar.
I believe a second
dot-come bust is coming. Much money is
being spent on useless data mining schemes attached to
social network sites where somebody read "Nineteen Eighty
Four" as a business model instruction manual. At some point
people are going to figure out that knowing how everybody
wipes their butt is pretty useless information and certainly
not worthy of sustaining trillions of dollars in investment.
The idea behind data mining is that the more you know
about
people, the better you can sell to them. This is a lot easier
than just building a better product and letting people know
they need it. The iPhone didn't come out of data mining. It
came out of the mind of a smart creative person. The idea
is
that with data mining, you can sell stuff and still be an
uncreative, lazy dope, an idea that's very appealing
apparently to all the un-creative lazy dopes out there.
Therefore the idea is to set the ball rolling on this collapse
by
having an unmanned robotic browser that continually surfs
the web when you're away for you generating useless
information for the cookie monsters out there. You'd of
course give it guidelines, you don't want it searching for
bomb
making ideas or German stump porn, but other than a few
rules of decorum, this thing would bounce around the web
like a wild weasel hitting random sites and generating
random
(and useless) web browsing data.
Why do this? Why not? It's a minor inconvenience that if I'm
looking for a bath mat on the web I have to endure endless
popups for bathmats the next few weeks, but aside from
that it just
bothers
me that people make money poking their noses into other
people's business. If it rendered useful information for
industry that would be one thing, but this is just a big scam
based on a wildly over valued commodity in my opinion.
Don't believe me? General Mills spent a billion dollars on
advertising last year and $835 million of it went to tv, the
rest spread around on other mediums like the web,
magazines, radio etc. Their billion dollar budgeted
advertising department knows WAAAAY more about what's
effective advertising and what isn't than I do and they say
the
web and data mining isn't the revolutionary panacea it's
sold
as.
Besides, it might be interesting to come back and look at
your
history. On particularly lazy days, might just want to sit
back
and let it do the browsing for you.
"Wow, plain tooth, champion tooth, m tooth, lance tooth. I
didn't realize there were so many different kinds of saw
blade teeth."