First item today is the news that Intel has put in place plans to put advertising into PC and later Xbox and Playstation games. Apparently we will be seeing the same sort of thing from Coca-Cola, Dunkin Doughnuts and others as well. The question that springs to mind, is: “If Game makers are raking in big advertising dollars, will game buyers see some of that money in the form of cheaper prices (or free ad supported games), or is this just a way to inflate profits without benefit to users?” Advertisers have proven once again that if a medium can contain content of value, then it can (and should in their minds) contain advertising as well. Lets hope consumers benefit from this shall we?
In other news, Microsoft has taken a leaf from the Wikipedia free community driven web encyclopedia. MS is adding the ability for users to submit corrections and additions to MS workers for editing before possible inclusion in Encarta. Since Wikipedia is a FREE community driven effort and Encarta is a proprietary offering from a convicted monopolist, nobody seems to think it is at all likely that Encarta will garner a huge group of contributors like Wikipedia has. Apparently the new features have security implications for Microsoft’s subscription service.
