Your News Content Isn’t My News Content

I will admit it. I am a self professed lover of pretty much everything Google does. Sure, my emails aren’t fully secure and Google is collecting more consumer data than any other company or government agency on the face of the Earth, yet all in all, I love Google.

As a digital content marketer, I also love cookies and retargeting. For those that don’t know, a cookie is:

“A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser while the user is browsing that website. Every time the user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to notify the website of the user’s previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited by the user as far back as months or years ago).” – Wikipedia

Retargeting works off cookies. For those that don’t know retargeting is an online cookie-based platform which utilizes basic coding to follow you around the Internet. Have you ever visited Express.com to look at some clothing only to find their ads showing up on the side of your browser while on Facebook or any number of sites? That’s retargeting.

Now, as a digital content marketer, I love cookies and retargeting. It allows for more in depth tracking and a continued customer push to get involved in the company sales channel. As a digital content strategist, I love HTML cookies and retargeting. As a voracious news consumer, I hate Internet cookies and digital ad retargeting.

Cloud Computing Projections: A Rant

Begin Rant

Question: What is the last Cloud financial projection you heard or read about? What was the number? Was it an astronomical figure slated for more than five years removed? If you’re like me, I constantly read Cloud Computing projection articles which lay claim to Cloud services and data center services gaining X level of revenue by X year. Also, if you’re like me, the more articles you read about the financial projections of Cloud Computing solutions, the less and less you trust the projections. Sure, it’s great to say that Cloud hosted services will head north of $135 billion by 2020, but the truth is, all the projected figures are just that, projected financial figures. Just like projections for stocks, no one really knows if a certain number is going to be hit or not.

Why?