Monday, October 09, 2006

Geotagging is nice.. but..

What still baffles me is that advertisers haven't started using IP addresses to target geography. I mean.. not like everyone reading about something that happened in New York is in New York, and Barney's is wasting an impression on some kid in Wyoming doing research on Roc Center. An example of IP targeting is.. hey your IP is for example 64.143.354.601 which may translate into a dns address of like home-601.nyc.rr.com, well it's pretty obvious at this point that the user is in New York, and Roadrunner should even know which user account it relates to and have a location (privacy issues.. yes I know).

A less intrusive form of this could be a wifi hotspot. The way I initially saw Google's local strategy of buying wifi hotspots was that since a user is connected to a certain router, then Google should be smart enough to know where they are connected (right?) and they should be able to deliver a coupon for Melvin's Diner down the street. This seems like a less intrusive way to target advertsiements and given a higher percentage of people who would connect to one of these Google hotspots may not live in or be familiar with the neighborhood where they are connecting to the hotspot and may welcome a nice lunch deal from the place down the block. Just a thought..

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