A few years ago they figured out how to shoot audio ads into our personal space. Now an art student has come up with a way to insert text ads into digital photos. This is fascinating and highly repulsive at the same time. Behold the Image Fulgurator.

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

Francois Gossieaux has created the Marketing 2.0 group on Ning. I joined up today, amazing to see how far Ning has come in such a short time. See you in the forums and make sure to leave a comment on my profile.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook has quietly added the ability for users to vote up or down on ads. RWW rightly calls the majority of advertising on Facebook crap. I couldn’t agree more. I spent the day giving thumbs down to the majority of the ads I saw. The lack of targeted, relevant advertising is stunning for a company with a valuation north of $15 billion.

Geo-targeted ads, where the content of the ad is specific to your zipcode, are quite common these days. Unfortunately the lions share of geo-targeted ads are limited to dating sites. The ad you see here is somewhat relevant. I’m single and in my 30′s, but the next ad could just as likely be for hair-loss.

One thing I have noticed lately is that social networks about fishing have showed up more often. I guess I have fishing mentioned somewhere in my profile. However, I’m disappointed that I talked about going fishing on Cape Cod at least a dozen times on Facebook and not once did I see an ad with an offer local to the Cape. Talk about a lost opportunity. I purchased a ton of fishing gear before the trip, and not one dollar was earned via a web ad. Yet ads for hot women in Boston show up daily because that’s where money is in the eyes of advertisers.

How much of this can be attributed to the lack of mature targeting services on Facebook? We know their application interface leaves a lot to be desired for developers. I’ll have to take a look at what information is available to advertisers.

Soon I’ll be talking about how social networking profiles contain a wealth of information about members that isn’t being fully utilized for targeting purposes, intention and attention-based marketing. This is what’s coming next in the world of social media and online advertising.

This is brilliant. Fake Steve Jobs brings in Jerry Yang as a guest poster.

Making Light says:

The Associated Press … published a web form through which intimidated parties can give the AP money in return for “permission” to publish as few as five words. In this spirit, I will shortly be putting up my own Web form through which people can PayPal me money in exchange for my promise to not blow up the moon.

The Blogger backlash is going to be enormous. I cannot begin to voice how broken this model is. There is a middle ground similar to music licensing that is going to have to be worked out. Until then, the blogosphere is going to revolt. TechCrunch has already banned AP stories.

A few years ago I ran the Bunker Hill 8k road race. My time was 48:15 and average speed was 9:43. I ran it again yesterday and my time was 37:56 and average speed was 7:38. Progress!