Have you seen the Heineken/Swordfish ads? Basically they are commercials for the movie Swordfish, but there's a Heineken bottle, usually held by John Travolta, and the announcer just has to mention it. Really obviously too "say, is that a Heineken, what a beer!" or something like it. Really annoying and probably the reason why I'm not going to go see Swordfish.

But that reminds me that there is now technology to place ads in live broadcasts. I think ABC did that for some sporting event, where they replaced the ads on the field with their ads, on the fly and seamlessly. Oh wait, I remember now, they replaced a rival network's logo during the New Year's Day celebration in Times Square. Quite controversial since it was somewhat of a news show (at least it was a live event). I can see changing things when doing a television show but for a "live" broadcast that does seem awfully funny.

I've heard that some channel is going to start adding/changing product placements in old tv shows. Imagine the Fonz driving in on a Suzuki-labeled motorcycle instead of whatever he rode, probably a Harley. Sure the bike would obviously not be a Suzuki, but most viewers won't be able to tell. It's just sad to me.

Let's extrapolate this to the Internet, where I've started to see more and more inline ads. Instead of having banner ads or other dedicated images fed in from some adserver (which are easy to block), embed text ads or nearly text ads into the main text -- something that O'Reilly does. Much harder to block. By the way, the advertising standards association (forgot what their name is, but they set up the standard banner ad sizes which is why almost all ads are these specific sizes) wants to increase available ad sizes to half page and larger. Where's a working iCab when I need it?

Back to web inline ads. So the next step is for portal sites and free web site providers to inline ads. I'm not talking about adding banner ads or pop up ads, which some already do. But actually adding ads on the fly to the web pages they serve. Probably not too hard to dynamically process a user web page page and add a couple of ads in the main text, with the same font and style (probably set apart because you need something to signify to the reader that this is a new topic).

Let's go one step further. Have the browser add advertisements dynamically. The AOL browser is an obvious example, it already doesn't have a home page button (or you can't set the home page to another page, I forget which) and it goes through a proxy server in any case. Again not too hard for the proxy server to filter web pages and add content or remove content on the fly. This quickly gets into the illegal, especially on the fly target censoring (it's one thing to censor a web site, another to censor parts of a web page).

But I can see customized versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer, given out by ISPs, that do things like put in little see through ad emblems like what television stations do with their logos (the "better" ones at least, the worse ones put up opaque logos) or what Geocities used to do. Except instead of the Geocities see-through logo at the bottom right corner of the screen (nice use of Javascript by the way) it would be some product or whatever.

You can only go so far before there is a public outcry and lawmakers get into the picture, so I'm not expecting these things to happen anytime soon. Maybe in a year or two (the Internet does evolve quickly). I expect that filtering will become a bigger and bigger feature in web browsers.

As a last note, I just saw a television commercial for Norton Internet Security or something like that. Totally preying on people's fears about the Internet. It's just a commercial with people yelling out their credit card numbers, painting their bank account number on the garage door, skywriting their social security number. And then a voice says "without Norton Internet Security, you might as well tell everyone your secrets." Like it's anywhere that bad unless you run Microsoft Windows.