Ilya Vedrashko who writes Advertising Lab - a blog about the future of advertising and advertising technology - has posted a guest blog by yours truly!  It is the first of a three-part post about the ways in which online advertising needs to change to benefit consumers.  Read the post and let me know what you think!

On Tuesday, September 2nd, I had the opportunity to show off our site and service at the NY Tech Meetup.  The crowd was great (and huge) and I really appreciate all of the work that goes into the events.

Thanks to Allen Stern of CenterNetworks for the video.

Take a look at the video, below, and let us know what you think.

Click here to go to Mashable.com and read about ListensToYou.

http://mashable.com/2008/06/18/listenstoyo/

So, I am writing this post to complete my Technorati “claim of” our blog.

I have to put this code: [Deleted the code - can't be too safe :) ]

somewhere on the blog’s front page.

First, I am not sure if publishing that code in a public forum is a bad thing, but i suspect not, since Technorati suggests that as one way to complete this step.

What I really want to know, however, is: are there other steps I need to take to make our company and blog recognizable and understood.  It seems like there are thousands of things to do - an entire industry of them, in fact.  I wish someone would make a giant diagram of prioritized things to do.  I guess that is like asking for someone to do our job for us, though, so we’re going to keep working through it.

I can’t wait to make a big announcement in the next month about our product/service!

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The NY Times reported last week that the FTC reaffirmed its thinking that internet companies can responsibly self-police their privacy practices.  Website publishers and companies have privacy policies that are intended to report how your information is collected, stored and used, but these are often unclear and, mostly, just unread.  It is not realistic to expect users to read and understand the privacy policy of every website they visit.  It is like having to read and approve dozens of legal documents every day — and, most privacy policies state that they can change without notice, so they are moving targets.

The recent FTC comments have to do with a particular topic that is really important to ListensToYou: behavioral advertising - the practice of observing and storing your searching and surfing habits and history in order to target you with ads.  The commission wants website publishers to make users aware, in a very clear way, how their data may be used and wants users to be able to opt out of behavioral tracking.  This is an ok suggestion, but it still happens on a site-by-site basis.  Should I really have to opt out on all sites I visit?  To be clear, it could also happen at the ad network level.  A business that sells and serves ads on behalf of several websites could avoid tracking users on all of those websites.  Still, though, there are dozens of ad networks and that doesn’t even account for the thousands of sites that sell and serve their own ads.  Plus, it isn’t like the FTC is demanding or regulating these things, it is still relying on the websites or ad networks to do the right thing.

Last night NBC aired a special report on banking and the collateralized debt that contributed to the current financial crisis.  None other than former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said that the Fed was relying on the banks to do the right thing and to self-regulate.  We see how that worked out.  I am not saying that a privacy crisis similar to the financial crisis will occur, just that it isn’t enough to expect companies to protect us and that government institutions aren’t stepping in on consumers’ behalf.  Internet users cannot afford to be complacent about their own data.

Today is Data Privacy Day.  ListensToYou was founded not just to give an alternative to advertising based on data collected without user consent, but to participate in the awareness and discussion of data privacy.  Many people have told us that they don’t care about giving away their data.  Others have told us that the ListensToYou model would be difficult to implement because people are getting more and more comfortable giving up their data.  We think that is a problem - NOT that it is always a problem to give up your personal data, when you choose to do so, but to do so only because it seems more natural these days or because it is so common that people barely notice.

Erick Schonfeld, one of my favorite writers at TechCrunch, wrote a good post about this today.

I just want to remind people to give some thought to how they want their data to be accessible to organizations.  I think ListensToYou is a good step toward giving an alternative method of advertising, but there are more situations to think about - passwords, friends, pictures, etc.

A fair question.  One of our friends posed this question over dinner a few weeks ago suspecting, correctly, that our lack of communication was because things ARE happening (rather than because things just aren’t happening).  It is a difficult task to bring a new way to advertise into the market in a meaningful way.  ListensToYou is a good idea and, if you read some of the posts on this blog, guest posts (post 1, post 2 and post 3), and posts by other sites, you can see the benefit to the entire advertising chain - beginning with the consumer/viewer. 

Starting out - the first steps toward building it to its full potential - takes time.  We have a lot of interested partners and each has helped us form and refine our product, which is what we have been doing: building and refining an implementable product.  The good news is that we expect to exit closed beta this month or early next and we will launch with our first partner at the same time!  We are excited about making ListensToYou a reality.  There is still much more to be done to give users the control they want over online advertising, but we’re taking the first steps and we think you’ll like the results.

As always, please contact us with suggestions (I read all of these) or questions or submit a comment to our feedback posts to begin or add to a discussion about ListensToYou.