First up, here’s a demo of the new app FingerPlay MIDI, which turns Android into a simple touch controller. True, we’ve seen similar things on iPhone, and Apple’s platform has precise multitouch which Android lacks, but it’s nice to see the concept extended across platforms. Big thanks to postromantic on Twitter for the tip! (Follow cdmblogs for more.)

FingerPlay MIDI

I can’t tell yet if this will be open source – that would actually be nice, I think, as it’d allow the community of developers to have a shared set of tools. (In fact, it seems a logical model would be to cash in on general-market apps and open source the more music-specific, niche stuff.)

In other Android mobile news, Christopher Souvey continues to work on his Musical application and the Musical Pro desktop app. The desktop client works with MIDI over Wifi, and thanks to the Cupcake OS update, latency is greatly reduced after a complete rewrite and the creation of custom drawing and event handling and controls. Check out the slick new tuner and UI Christopher has been developing, too.

http://www.souvey.com/ [blog with all the latest]
http://www.souvey.com/musical/

This play-along piano is probably not something any of you folks desperately need, but it is a good demonstration of what’s possible.

Another interesting thread to follow will be the growing power of Web apps. On Android, you’re already able to combine a Web app with the Java APIs, and going another level, mobile apps with native ARM code for the processor. Translation: while phones still have a fraction of the power of your computer, it’s getting easier for developers to work across platforms and to take advantage of what power is there. That’s leading to trends that could be of use not only to a single platform (Android, iPhone), but to mobile devices in general.

Reware your PDA from Hans-Christoph Steiner on Vimeo.

Give a hoot – don’t pollute with your old mobile gear. Make musical creations with it instead, powered by Linux.

Sure, there are wonderful things happening with mobile music applications on platforms like the shiny, new iPhone. But remember how technology was supposed to democratize access? Lots of us don’t have the money for a new iPhone or iPod. And how many of us have outdated Pocket PCs and Palms collecting dust? How many of these highly toxic devices get thrown away?

Linux to the rescue.

One of the biggest hits of my talk at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal was the mention of the Reware, a project by Hans-Christopher Steiner, who is doing research at New York’s Eyebeam. He has literally a box full of old PDAs – the kind a lot of people would give away at this point – which he has rescued in order to reuse as development platforms and musical devices.

There’s something just stunning about watching an old Pocket PC transformed into an interesting musical device. It’s like the feeling you get when you save a puppy with the help of a rescue / adoption agency, and instead of being put down, Buster turns out to be an agility champion. (Sorry. I really love dogs.)

Reware Project at Eyebeam

For a sample project, here you can dual-boot Linux on an old Palm:

Reware your PDA: dual boot Linux on a Palm TX from an SD card

Once you’ve done that, you can run your own creations and even Pd patches on your mobile. Even old iPods can work.

Pd Music Patching on PDAs

It’s a little trickier to recycle older embedded devices than it is desktop computers: for one thing, many of these devices lack floating-point calculation capability. (The FPU on the iPhone is one of the things that makes it so nice.) For fans of the multimedia environment Pd (Pure Data), the variant PDa (“Puredata anywhere”) is the solution. It rewrites signal processing as fixed point (integer) processing. It’s nowhere near as fast as a floating point-native Pd, and there are some other caveats, but there’s still a whole lot you can do with it. This is also good news for the currently-shipping Google Android handset, the HTC G1, which also lacks an FPU.

PDa 

Gunter Geiger is responsible for PDa, with help from lots of other folks. Now Hans is packaging all this stuff together to make it easier to run.

See it in Person; More Soon!

If you’re in the New York area, next week Hans is coming to Handmade Music to show off the work he’s doing. Check out the lineup on our new, evolving Handmade Music minisite:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

That’s free, 7:30pm Thursday, May 21 in Brooklyn at 3rd Ward.

For fans of Android, I’ll be talking about development on Google’s own open source, Java-based mobile platform, which also runs the Linux kernel.

Android is itself getting ported to alternative platforms, again thanks to the magic of GNU/Linux and open source. Here’s just a small sampling:

Android Ports and Hacks Round-up

If Android also gives us native library access, it could become powerful for music. Even with just the 1.5 SDK, there’s a Java library for interactive music production. Both projects should cross-pollinate, though, because of the common Linux kernel between them.

If you’re not in the New York area, we’ll post details early next week about a live webstream. And we should have additional video after the event.

Hans and I are also working on getting Pd running on the BUG, which is both open-source software and hardware.

To round things out, here’s a video by Public Radio International’s Takeaway, showing how Hans is working with hackers doing other super-cool projects at Brooklyn’s NYC Resistor. It’s just one of many hacklabs sprouting all over the globe.

We’ve got further compelling evidence Apple doesn’t really own multi-touch and multi-touch gestures — and that other devices and interfaces will press forward (which is a good thing for everyone). Lest you think I’m straying too far from creating digital music, by the way, I think this means lots of new music apps – as musicians have devoured multi-touch more than any other group (and certainly have used it for the coolest stuff).

I am concerned about how multi-touch innovation will wrangle with over-zealous intellectual property legal wrangling. But hopefully I made it clear that, even with my concerns about Apple, the report that Google had pulled multi-touch capabilities to please Apple was full of question marks.

Luke Hutchison is more of an expert in this field than any Silicon Valley rumor reporter. Luke pulled off the kernel module hack that turns the Android G1 into a multi-touch gesture-capable device (with, incidentally, some examples that have tantalizing possibilities for musical applications). He has detailed instructions on that, if you’re interested – and his familiarity with the code gives him a compelling argument that Google did not cave to Apple – and Apple may not even have relevant patents in this case.

It’s worth reading his whole story as it’s full of technical details as far as multi-touch’s future on G1, but here’s the executive summary as far as Apple blocking multi-touch on Android:

(1) The G1 was simply never intended to be a multi-touch device.
(2) Apple’s multitouch patent may not even cover the pinch gesture.
(3) Google *is* interested in multitouch capabilities, it’s just nowhere near the top of their priority list.
(4) Google will deal with legal issues if and when they come up, but that hardly stops them doing something they think should be done.
(5) Apparently the driver for a resistive MT-capable/iPhone-like touchscreen was checked into the git kernel tree after the 1.0 release, so we now have (at least?) two MT-capable drivers in the tree.

In other words, if you make an iClone, expect to hear from Apple legal. If you just want to use or develop multi-touch devices and interfaces, rest easy – because even if Apple decides to make trouble, they’re likely facing even more multi-touch gesture-controlled devices and law teams to back them up.

Definitely worth reading, at Luke’s blog:
The Android Multi-Touch Conspiracy… and more tinfoil hats

Zoom-Zoom-Zoom — Get Multi-Touch Zooming Support on your T-Mobile G1 TODAY (and by the way, you can hack the kernel on new G1s without the Android developer unit?)

Apple’s iPhone should be a herald of a new age in interface design. But now, with speculation that Apple and Palm could get into a patent battle, and murky concerns about patents in multi-touch interface design in general, it’s unclear how much intellectual property legal wrangling will have to happen first.

I’m going to resist turning this into a long rant – partly because I think the jury is out on so many issues. It’s never been entirely clear what Apple continues sacred in its intellectual property on the iPhone. It’s even less clear – with similar multi-touch designs spreading back decades and murky law around gestures in general – what their legal standing is. No one knows at this point whether there will actually be a lawsuit between Palm and Apple (or which direction). But one thing I can say with confidence: we need alternatives to Apple. Even if you love your iPhone, I think you’ll agree it’d be tragic if other vendors didn’t push the technology forward. And we need alternatives like Google Android that support real open development, release free and open source code, and provide an option to Apple’s deeply proprietary, restrictive development platform. Innovative music software in particular won’t be able to thrive if alternatives are closed or nonexistent.

Here’s a quick look at where we’ve been, and where things are:

This has been a storm cloud since the beginning. Me, in January 2007, immediately following the keynote: Macworld: Will Apple Keep its iPhone Closed? Multi-Touch Patents? (I wish I had been wrong. No one believed me at the time that these two areas would be big issues.)

The original tech predates the iPhone. Engadget in 2007 on Apple’s multi-touch roots – FingerWorks gave them a patent portfolio and some key technology.

Google may have dropped out of the race. VentureBeat has a source that claims Google voluntarily dropped multi-touch to keep Apple happy. Even if that’s not true, I think potential legal battles with Apple – and the incorrect notion among consumers that this is Apple’s invention – could have a chilling effect. Update: There may indeed be some chilliness in the air, but there’s strong evidence that Google didn’t “cave” to Apple somehow — they just didn’t get around to it. And a multi-touch G1 may not be far off. Just asked the guy who’s already hacked the G1.

Both Apple and Palm are loaded up with patents – and no one knows what will happen. Engadget analyzes the potential for a Palm/Apple legal standoff – but there are two major issues here. One, Palm has a healthy patent portfolio of their own, meaning they could counter-sue. Two, no one knows if anything will come of this – aside from some saber rattling, we’re not even sure there will be a suit.

Just to keep things in perspective, though: I think multi-touch in general is safe. It’s a technology coming to phones, mobile devices, computers, Windows 7, Synaptic trackpads, Linux … the list goes on. To me, the question is whether developers will be free to try ideas without lawyers breathing down their necks, and that’s very much an open question.

And I think the deeper questions about whether open development, as on Android, can be competitive, may prove to be more important in the long run. Apple aside, we need more common-sense, modernized patent law – even if the Android in this case voluntarily dropped a feature, you can see that the issues are linked. And we need to have open development if people are to have freedom to experiment with design. This is about more than Palm and Apple; it’s about how we interact with our tech.

CNET has a terrific interview with Rio Caraeff of Universal Music Group’s eLabs. Caraeff is a new breed of record exec – the kind of people we’d actually want running the industry. He’s a software guy and a mobile guy.

UMG digital chief on iTunes, DRM, and Android [CNET Digital Media]

The record industry has clearly seen the light on DRM, so that’s not really news, except that now you can see them saying it in public (and I imagine there has been long-running internal lobbying from those in the industry who got it long ago).

The news for me really what he has to say about the mobile space – his expertise. On iPod, he says what we don’t need is more proprietary alternatives: “I don’t think having more devices and more proprietary software or hardware in the market is the right answer.”

But most encouraging to me is how bullish he is on Google’s Android platform – and the fact that the proof is already available in the numbers available now. It seems the Web world is attracted to whatever is shiny, new, and not-ready-for-primetime, so bloggers last week forgot about Android and moved on to Palm’s (not-shipping) WebOS and Palm pre. That’s all fine and good, and WebOS certainly follows some of the same trends Android does, but let’s not lose focus just yet, right?

Universal worked with Amazon on their integrated Android store, and the results sound very impressive.

…now Amazon will tell you that Android is their single largest source of downloads from any third-party partnership that they’ve ever done. It’s a tremendous amount of consumption that we’re seeing once you integrate it seamlessly into a user experience that’s elegant and easy to use. It’s not 10 clicks. It’s very elegant and easy. We’re starting to see consumption increase significantly.

It’s early days on Android. There’s not that many out there on T-Mobile, but even with the small amount out there, they’re downloading and purchasing a ton of music over the air on T-Mobile.

This to me points to some encouraging signs:

Android has an edge for developers. Note that from a development, user experience, and deployment perspective, the Android platform was a big part of this success. You couldn’t do an Amazon store on the iPhone.

Android has legs. None of that would be meaningful if it weren’t translating to sales. But this says to me that the open Android platform can be a successful outlet, without necessarily needing a middleman like Apple. And it suggests some positive things for, say, developers selling software (or musicians doing weird, 99-cent generative music games) on the platform.

Mobile sales in general could be big for music. The whole problem for the record industry isn’t all that complicated: it’s that one medium (CDs) has been shrinking in dollar figures faster than its successor (online music) has been growing. So the industry just needs new growth. It’s encouraging to see that that could mean just selling music at reasonable prices, free of DRM. That’s a huge change from the previous plan, which appeared to be slicing 30 seconds out of a track, calling it a “ringtone,” and charging more than you would for a single.

There’s plenty worth checking out in the whole story. But this does make me feel even more excited about Android and what’s possible. The Amazon store is amazing: you buy and download tracks over the air, and then bring them back to your machine. Sure, you can do that with iTunes, and finally iTunes doesn’t have DRM on its tracks. But Amazon was able to come onto the device as a third party (working with HTC, Google, and TMobile). With Apple, the only way to get tracks back on your computer is to go through their iTunes conduit. With Amazon, you can do whatever you like. And the underlying stacks that enable the app are all open source, from the APIs to the developer tools. That’s a pretty marked difference.

Having a different mechanism for selling music could also mean that the UMG of tomorrow is very different from the UMG of yesterday. It’s certainly encouraging to think there are people at the company who see technology in the way a lot of the rest of us do. But this could also mean new opportunities for independent artists and smaller labels – and greater opportunities for everyone making music.

We’ll be looking more at the Android platform in 2009, and other trends in mobile. Now I just need to get myself a G1.

Google has responded to widespread concerns about political ads, particularly those promoting California’s Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban prior to last week’s US election. On one hand, I think their answers on policy and placement are incomplete. On the other, it looks like the upshot of this will be better tools for publishers to make their own decisions, which to me is fundamentally what the issue is about. For now, it’s a waiting game until promised improvements appear.

(If you’re bored by this discussion, don’t worry – we’ve got lots more music tech-specific stuff to talk about. But I know it matters to at least some of you directly, including music/music tech publishers out there.)

The response is on Google’s Inside AdSense blog, as posted at the end of the day Friday.

Political ads on AdSense sites

See my previous posts here on CDM. I posted these items because this issue hit music tech in a big way, from individual bloggers to big commercial press outlets – and advertising support is often used to describe what future revenue could look like for musicians:

Google AdSense Fails on Relevancy, Control, Policy, and Google Says Nothing

Google Ads Disabled; Your Partner is Your Business

In fact, the fact that readers didn’t universally agree with me – either on the political issues or my own spin on what this meant for publishers – only proves my point. You need individual publisher control of ads, just as you need human beings controlling editorial content. (If search engines alone told you everything, I don’t think we’d have any regular readers of anything.)

It’s worth reading Google’s complete response, but let’s evaluate it based on my original complaints – relevancy, policy, and publisher control:

Relevancy

Google confirms what we suspected, which is that “placement targeting” allows “advertisers to find sites serving a specific audience, such as "Males ages 18-24." Their answer isn’t entirely satisfactory here, though. For me, at least, the political ads didn’t appear in Google’s tool that’s supposed to review placement-targeted ads. And it’s clear that in this case placement-targeted ads aimed at an audience clashed with niche-specific sites that didn’t want political ads. Unlike a contextually-targeted ad based on a keyword (like “synth” or “recording”), the relationship to site content was unclear. If that had been something like cool sneakers, people probably wouldn’t have cared, so I have to agree with other publishers who felt that even basic publisher controls limiting political ads could be a remedy.

It’s still a mystery which audience Prop 8 supporters targeted. Given the amount of money spent on this campaign, maybe “all of them” is close.

Policy

Google still stands by its political policy, saying that “Google’s advertising system does not favor one political position over another.” But they offer absolutely no explanation of why Proposition 8 ads were consistent with that policy. Google explicitly says ads “advocating against” a group of people aren’t allowed, and even lists sexual preference as one of their “protected groups.”

Let’s flip this around. Proposition 8 opponents have now targeted Mormons and called for a boycott of the entire state of Utah. I understand their rationale – the Church of Latter-Day States funded campaigns in favor of the marriage ban. But to me, I wouldn’t want anti-Mormon ads on my site any more than I’d want ads against gay marriage. This kind of advocacy is not something I personally believe in, and quite frankly, I know we have Mormon and gay readers alike. I respect them, and I want advertising to respect them, too. That’s not just to be “nice”; that’s how I would conduct myself outside of the site, as well.

I can only imagine that Google has chosen to apply the standard of advocating “against” groups very narrowly. But to me, such a standard works only if it’s applied liberally. It’s pretty hard to imagine that an ad supporting a gay marriage ban isn’t implicitly an ad advocating against homosexuals, just as it would be hard to imagine an ad supporting a boycott of Utah isn’t implicitly advocating against the Mormon church. That’s not a judgment of either argument – but I personally wouldn’t want that kind of advocacy on my site, and if Google doesn’t apply this standard in this case, where do they draw the line?

The bottom line to all of this is, publishers need control to make their own call.

Control

Putting all your faith in Google, of course, is asking for trouble – whether Google means well or not. So to me, the answer from Google AdSense that overrides the rest of these issues is on publisher control.

We’ve heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we’re working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we’re working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We’ll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it," while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.

Now we’re talking. If publishers had adequate controls, differences on policy and concerns about certain kinds of placements wouldn’t have to come to people dropping AdSense altogether.

The only issue is, of course, for now this is just a promise – the improvements in the service aren’t here yet (though “next couple weeks” is promising as a timeframe). I’ll be watching for these controls to appear, because I think that the Prop 8 battle aside, this has profound implications for the future of advertising.

At the same time, I still think this illustrates why competition is important – both from competing services, and from publishers selling their own ad space. Interestingly, part of the problem is that AdSense has actually gotten quite good. I saw some kneejerk reactions around the Web (comments here, links elsewhere) suggesting I was nuts for even suggesting this was an issue, because their take was that AdSense was useless. I think what they’ve missed is that for sites with reasonably well-optimized content and keyword relevancy that connects to Google’s ad inventory, AdSense isn’t a bad solution, at least as a complement to direct ad sales. (AdSense is rarely as valuable as direct sales – for CDM, for instance, it’s basically just some background revenue that defrays hosting costs.)

But there’s no question in my mind that competition makes any service better. I’m still waiting on proposed alternatives from Microsoft and Yahoo. But even users threatening to leave AdSense clearly got their attention. And, frankly, that’s how this whole thing is supposed to work.

The ad-supported Web could be part of what allows music technology information and musician-made content to be free in the future. But the more this area grows, the more these kinds of debates over how ads are chosen, priced, and delivered will become important.

It’s a nearly unanimously-held belief: the future of digital content will depend, at least in part, on revenue from ads. This site is supported by ads. Musicians and digital producers will be looking to ads to support what they’re doing – sometimes in the form of direct ad revenue, sometimes in support for sites and communities they use (Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and so on). Ads are very often what makes the Internet free.

But if ad-supported models are going to work, the system that delivers the ads has to work. This week, I believe Google failed to deliver the solution it promises its publishers. They violated their own policies, violated the principle of their service, violated the trust of their publishers, and then failed to respond to an issue that was deeply time-sensitive.

When Third-Party Ads Attack

Before I’m misunderstood, let’s consider advertising policy, which is not the same as editorial policy. In print publishing, whether a small-town weekly newspaper or The New York Times, ad sales relationships have been directly between a publisher and an advertiser. Running an ad does not mean an endorsement of the advertiser or their message or product. In fact, newspapers frequently run “op ed”-style ads that directly conflict with editorial policy, though not without being criticized by some for doing so. The Times runs a regular full-page ad from energy giant Exxon/Mobil, for instance.

In online publishing, we very frequently hand over those relationships to a third party. We expect, in return, that our interests as a publisher will be served by the third party.

This week, Google AdSense bombarded an enormous number of partner sites, Create Digital Music included, with banners opposing same-sex marriage in California, a right that had been protected in that state. Bizarrely, many music tech sites were targeted. The ads were offensive to many publishers; whatever your feelings about marriage and homosexuality, these were effectively ads in favor of discrimination. One ad run on this site was also factually inaccurate, suggesting that California protections for gay marriage can be equated to a mandate to teach about same-sex relationships in schools; various California officials have said that’s not true. Even if you want to debate the issue, that means the ads were claiming something that was false, which is not as debatable.

But tempting as it may be to focus on the political issue and the ads themselves, the ads are not the problem. The problem is that Google failed its publishers, failed the trust we place in Google, and then failed to talk about what it had done. It’s a failure of really historic proportions, and one that really merits a close examination and open debate if ad-supported content has any future at all. The fact that Proposition 8 passed and passed by a very narrow margin, is likely to turn up the political heat on that debate. Advertising was widely credited for the passage of the proposition, making us as publishers unwitting partners in the passage of a proposition many of us would have opposed. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that, Proposition 8 aside, the fault is Google’s for delivering well below the expectations of publishers.

Google’s Promise to Publishers

Unlike the traditional newspapers I used above, using Google AdSense is essentially entrusting your ads to an algorithm, to one that connects your content to relevant ads. Now, no one expects this algorithm to be perfect. Sometimes, it’s downright comical. When CDM covered Hatebeak, a parrot that “sings” death metal music, we got ads for bird feed

That said, the basic pitch Google makes to publishers is relevancy. Without relevancy, ads look out of place. They detract from the quality of the content we’re publishing. And most importantly, ads need to be relevant to make publishers money, which is the whole point. At least in the bird feed example, it was clear that the algorithm was making some match based on content, even if it wasn’t one an human might pick. (In fact, it might even work then – interested in parrots? Maybe you are interested in bird feed, even on a music site.)

But don’t take my word for it. Take Google’s:

AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

They go on to say:

Competitive Ad Filter enables you to filter out specific competitors or specific advertisers.

Editorial Review makes sure that all Google ads are reviewed and approved by the Google team, ensuring that inappropriate ads don’t appear on your pages.

Of course, none of that happened here.

My site is not a political site. Prior to this issue coming up, there’s no way an ad specific to California, entirely political in nature, had anything to do with the context of the site. Now, after this has happened, I’ve started writing posts with words like “homosexual” and “gay marriage,” so those ads would be contextual now. But as of Monday when ads appeared here, they had no business on the site. In fact, it would have been just as inappropriate if an ad saying “Oppose Proposition 8” had appeared on the site. For political reasons, I might not have objected, but it certainly would not have been “ads so well-matched … your readers will actually find them useful.”

Naturally, Google does run some ads as a public service, like “Give to the Red Cross.” But an ad encouraging you to give money to help tsunami victims is relevant to everyone, and it’s an issue on which everyone can agree. Political ads are quite different. And, in fact, sites only run those public service announcements when Google’s algorithm can’t find contextual ads to deliver.

As many publishers point out, the bottom line is lost revenue when this system fails – part of the reason a lot of us are considering dropping Google permanently, even if we don’t see anti-gay ads again. Since Google is click-based, not impression-based, we were actually paying bandwidth costs and missing out on ad revenue in order to carry these ads.

That said, we still don’t really know why this happened with the Prop 8 ads. Did the advertisers just buy up random keywords, getting them the technology placements? (And if so, does Google have a policy for such advertiser abuse?) Or does Google’s contextual targeting actually consider these ads relevant?

Whatever the answer, it gets worse.

Google’s Political Ad Policy

Below: one of the ads in question. Funny, on CDM when we think of protect childrens’ education, we think of expanding funding for teaching music. But worse, it violates Google’s own policies.

We as publishers are Google’s customers. You would think that massive online publicity for this story and widespread complaints from publishes would prompt some sort of response from the company. That hasn’t happened, minus a condescending and inadequate blog post on the Inside AdSense blog explaining how to block ads. (More on why that’s unhelpful in a moment.)

To get any explanation from Google, I had to rely, ironically, on a news article in which I myself was quoted. An unidentified Google spokesperson told the [London] Times Online:

Google allows ads that advocate for particular political position, regardless of the views that they represent. We’re currently allowing ads advocating both for and against Proposition 8.

That statement is based on Google’s published political advertising policy:

We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible.

There’s just one problem: that’s not the whole policy. Also from Google:

However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group.

Protected group, eh?

Don’t promote violence or advocate against a protected group.

Ad text advocating against any organization, person, or group of people is not permitted.
Advertisements and associated websites may not promote violence or advocate against a protected group. A protected group is distinguished by their:

• Race or ethnic origin
• Color
• National origin
• Religion
• Disability
• Sex
• Age
• Veteran status
• Sexual orientation/Gender identity

Emphasis Google’s. Note the last bullet point.

Supporting Proposition 8 isn’t advocating violence, of course. But it is is “advocating against a protected group” and advocating against “a group of people.” It doesn’t get any more clear-cut than this, Google. There’s no more damning way to advocate against a group of people than to run ad texts explicitly advocating non-equal treatment under the law. And some of these ads went further, suggesting that “group of people,” that “protected group” endangered childrens’ education.

We just elected our first African-American President in America – something that my pro-McCain, Republican-voting friends have said, despite their regrets about the election, really impressed them. If the Web had existed in the 1960s, political advocates might have run ads opposing voting protection for blacks. There’s no question now that such an ad would be advocacy against a group, even if the ad wasn’t explicitly “I don’t like black people.” This is the same issue.

If Google doesn’t follow their own ad policies in this case, there’s no guarantee that we can trust anything Google says about their ad programs. As a publisher, I can’t trust a relationship with any vendor that can’t follow their own policies.

Control for Publishers is Inadequate

A story in Information Week noted that some posters in online forums claim Google’s controls for blocking ads are sufficient. They’re not.

There are two methods for blocking ads on AdSense, and neither one in this case was appropriate or adequate.

Competitive Ad Filter: This filter is designed to allow you to block ads from competitive sites. In this case, it failed on a number of levels.

• You need to know what you’re blocking. It’s called a competitive filter for a reason – the assumption is that you know in advance what ads you don’t want to appear. In this case, we didn’t expect ads from “protectmarriage.com.”
• It’s domain-specific: If we did succeed in blocking these ads, the Prop 8 supporters could simply point to a differen domain and get around the block.
• There’s no way to review ads: I relied on readers in California to even know the Prop 8 ads were running in the first place. I was fortunate those readers gave me the benefit of the doubt and that they responded so quickly.
• The ad filter isn’t real-time: Google’s own blog post concedes that it can take several hours for the filter to take effect. That’s truly unacceptable, because other changes like what the ad code looks like are immediate. And in this case, the day before an election, we couldn’t afford to wait several hours. My own true recourse was to shut off Google Ads entirely. Now I’m finding it difficult to switch it back on.

Ad Review Center: This sounds promising at first. But it’s off by default, it can be necessary to automatically approve ads for ad auctions to work properly, and most importantly, it doesn’t actually have anything to do with contextual ads. The Ad Review Center is exclusively for placement-targeted advertising; that is, ads placed specifically on your site by advertising. The Prop 8 supporters used contextual advertising, based on keywords. So this is really entirely irrelevant.

The Prop 8 Ad Debacle: Failure on Every Level

The Proposition 8 ads that appeared were a failure on a number of levels. For those of you keeping score at home:

• The ads weren’t relevant. While the ads appear to have been geo-targeted, AdSense promises ads relevant to content. I don’t want ads for plumbing contractors in Rhode Island, even if you’re reading there, because I want content-relevant ads.
• Publishers lost money. Because the ads were irrelevant and offensive to many readers, publishers on all kinds of blogs reported suddenly-plunging click-through revenue. That may not mean much to small sites, at least in one day. But the loss on bigger sites must have been pretty painful. (And ironically, this means Google didn’t make as much, either!)
• It wasn’t a fluke. Ads were delivered in large quantities to this site, and to many others. Tech sites may even have been targeted specifically; ads ran on Slashdot and Techcrunch.
• The ads violated Google’s own political policy. If this doesn’t count as advocating against a group based on sexual preference, nothing does. So either Google broke their own policy, or their own policy is meaningless. And it’s clear Google left the ads in the network days after the issue appeared, so they can’t plead ignorance – even less so given that they use their editorial review as a selling point for the service.
• Publishers couldn’t do anything once the ads were placed. Not only did we find out the ads were running the hard way, but we had no real-time ability to block the ads – and they were, by definition, time-sensitive. The way to block the ads effectively? Disable Google Ads.
• Google doesn’t have a support outlet. While there’s an informal discussion group, there isn’t a clear, formal way for publishers to complain to Google.
• Google was completely unresponsive. Again, we’re Google’s customers. Days later, we’ve still heard nothing from Google officially, other than a thinly-veiled, defensive blog post explaining their (inadequate) blocking mechanism without mentioning the issue by name, and some faceless statements in the press that we could have copied and pasted from their FAQ.

We Need a More Perfect Web

I’d like to see several things come out of this mess.

I hope that we start to have a real debate about advertising policy. The issues here were to me pretty clear-cut, but advertising policy in general deals with all kinds of tough issues. It’s time to start talking about that as publishers and advertisers alike.

I hope that we get some response from Google. We need to know what actually happened and why. And, frankly, I would need a significantly expanded toolset for publisher control before ever considering running AdSense on my site again.

But I also hope we see more competition in the marketplace. There are various similar services, but in my experience they often don’t have enough ad inventory to be relevant on a site like CDM. That’s too bad. I think Google might have performed better here if they themselves faced more vibrant competition, and I think the whole ad market might improve, too. There are huge opportunities for advertisers online in these kind of sites, and the economic downturn means it’s even more important to make those solutions work better. I know Microsoft and Yahoo are readying services. I look forward to seeing them.

This was, on every level, a complete mess. But now that the issue is out in the open, the end result could be better advertising systems – if the advertising vendors actually pay attention, and respond.

Just as importantly, this debacle could also mean a new climate in which discriminatory ads aren’t tolerated. Publishers are dropping AdSense left and right, and they should. This violated Google’s principles and policy, and many of us believe it’s wrong to run ads that discriminate against a group of people.

There’s no question this is an important issue for musicians. Amidst all the hype about projects from the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead has been the assumption that our own sites, and community sites we depend on, will be supported by ads. That means that what impacts ads impacts us.

If you believe the future of the Web is bright, then you must also believe that we can all do better.

Related:

Google caught up in row over gay marriage vote [Times Online]

Google Instructs AdSense Publishers How To Block Its Ads [Information Week]

Previously:

Google Ads Disabled; Your Partner is Your Business

CDM was one of many sites targeted with ads that were irrelevant to our content and offensive to at least some readers and publishers. To me, this ad is a massive abuse of the trust publishers place in Google. Further, publishers discovered competitive ad filters didn’t block this unwanted content. I have disabled all Google campaigns at least until after the US election, even though Google Ads are a major source of the revenue that pays our server bills.

I hope Google responds to what happened soon. I will say Google is generally to be applauded for being responsive to abuses of their network, so I’m optimistic. To me, this conflicts with the whole principle of targeted ad networks, and I hope we get a remedy. (At the very least, I’m disappointed that the ad filter wasn’t more responsive once we found the issue.)

Google aside, I feel obligated to say something about the politics behind this. If you support Proposition 8 or its principles, I don’t intend to cause offense; you’re entitled to your opinion, and this is an issue to be decided in California. But one thing I really believe about creative communities is that it’s essential to make our first political imperative tolerance and support. There’s a wider community of people here whom I’m sure don’t always agree. But one thing I won’t tolerate is a position that excludes another group or judges any “lifestyle,” whether that’s you choosing to use racks of modular analog synths or whom you choose as your partner. California will make its own choice in regards to its constitution. But for CDM, this is a simple question. And as a matter of policy, whether political or otherwise, my promise is that ads on CDM will not conflict with what those of us who work on the site believe. For that reason, I’m sorry this happened, and the ad interaction is something I’ll look closely at in future.

Update: Google has posted how-to-block instructions. But the results can take hours to take effect, and we’re in a minute-to-minute election cycle. That’s simply not good enough. And it doesn’t answer why these ads appeared in the first place, when they’re irrelevant to content. It demonstrates a single advertiser can game the whole system.

See the map at Google

The results are heavily tilted toward acoustic instruments, naturally, though they happily go well beyond the expected Sam Ash and Guitar Center fare. I’m curious about shops which specialize in electronic gear — analog, digital, old, modern, software, whatever. Of course, not every city can be lucky enough to have a Robotspeak, which is basically CDM heaven (or credit card Hell, depending on how you look at it.) If you do have an electricity-friendly shop, though, let us know, and I’ll add it to my Desired World Tour Destinations list; point it out in comments here.

If you have a shop near you, no matter how small, be sure to mark it!

Ardour, the free and open source DAW for Mac and Linux, has already won some fans by providing robust audio multitrack features in free software, along with some unique innovations (like robust support for inter-app JACK audio routing). But one major complaint has been a lack of serious MIDI tools. MIDI functionality is baked in, but it’s not as full-featured as some might like.

That should change soon: Ardour is involved in Google’s Summer of Code, a seasonal code-fest that helps develop open source projects. Ardour creator Paul Davis describes progress on his Ardour blog:

Dave Robillard continues his work on Ardour’s MIDI recording, playback and editing capabilities as part of the Google Summer of Code program. Since the last screenshot (below), Dave has added color coding of velocity values, percussion tracks, two modes for delivering MIDI CC data (discrete+interpolated), and some basic editing operations such as quantize, note selection and pencil-based note creation & deletion.

Sounds great to me. Of course, it could rob Paul of the job of having to listen to whining forum/comment trolls complaining about the lack of Ardour MIDI. We’ll be watching — an update following the Summer of Code is definitely in order. I’d love to have a free DAW to use with students, for instance, as opposed to them (cough) pirating Cubase.