Miller’s return comes after a rancorous departure from Time Warner, where he served as CEO of AOL. His landing pad, called Clickable, recently debuted their technology at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September.

Clickable also assembled another part of its management team. Max Kalehoff, most recently VP of Marketing at Nielsen Buzzmetrics, will serve in the same capacity in Clickable’s corporate structure.

The company touted Miller’s addition to the board, citing his extensive knowledge of the online advertising industry. Clickable wants to make search advertising management an easy to use web service.

Doing so will allow Clickable clients to manage ad campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other providers from a single interface. Miller enthusiastically touted Clickable in a statement, saying, "Clickable represents the next wave of innovation, bringing simplicity, efficiency and transparency to the (small to medium-sized) market."

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Instead of allowing a click to be triggered in a broad rectangle around the text – which used to include whitespace in that area – you must now click specifically on the underlined title or the colorized URL below the snippet.

I’ve marked the old and new clickable areas below – note these are just approximations to get the point across, it’s not pixel-perfect:

With this change, Google wants to decrease accidental clicks. This has the short-term potential of lowering your AdSense revenues, but I think it’s a good move. Not only because it’s more ethical, but also because in the long run advertisers will be more likely to pay for services that work, and accidental clicks are a kind of system bug. I’m curious how much my AdSense income will drop, I guess all those of us using AdSense will see in a day or two.

Graphic/ Flash ads in the meantime I suppose aren’t affected by this, but I asked Google just in case, and will update if I get a reply.

[Thanks Ionut and Daniel!]

Comments

Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture updated and improved my initial attempt (shown here) and Electric Sheep’s Chris Carella also weighs in on the topic.

I’ve stopped following the Second Life hype months ago…most of our projects to date have been experiments for brands learning about virtual worlds. While we continue to climb the Slope of Enlightenment with our partners, I believe this upcoming year we will begin to showcase the power of virtual worlds and the ways they can build much stronger communities than the web.

In the comments of my initial post, Prokofy Neva notes how the hype cycle might get even more granular in its analysis.

All interesting points to consider.

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On one point he makes, though, I just don’t agree.

Steve says Second Life is all about escapism:

[] any metaverse that we’re talking about here-it’s all about people are going into these universes to escape their lives and have a virtual life and live that.

(Thanks to Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture for transcribing Steve’s interview.)

Undoubtedly many people do use places like Second Life for that reason. But it’s not all about escapism.

I think Second Life presents an alternative reality – a parallel place, if you will, where you can construct a viable approximation of a real environment that certainly has little to do with escapism.

The increasing entrance of established businesses into Second Life is hardly about escapism. It’s about real business opportunity even though many haven’t entirely figured out why there’re they or exactly what they’re going to do.

And that’s the opportunity for PR pros – figure it out alongside the experimenters and early adopters in a joint learning path that will produce business opportunities for mutual benefit.

Related posts:

• Real-world opportunities in Second Life
• Get a Second Life now

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