By James Cooley - August 30 2006 tags: ads business noise

Microsoft just added AdCentre as a rival to the established Google’s AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, et al. These systems give you some degree of control over the ads that appear but require some research to get the balance right. Then there's the dilemma do you only feature ads that you'd recommend (and go broke) or just list anything as people will probably mentally block out (or adblock) ads anyway. Ze Frank argues we are getting used to lower quality information on the internet as we want our information quickly even if it has lots of noise as we can fill in the details elsewhere if necessary – have a look at his insightful "What would you rather live in - a room with a small squeaky clean pane of glass or a room made of glass that hadn't been cleaned in weeks" monologue. It's a more interesting trade-off than meets the eye.