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August 8th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

If you’re a blogger, you’re probably aware that FeedBurner recently began migrating customers to Google’s infrastructure, and in turn rolling out AdSense for RSS to certain publishers (Allen Stern had a good summary of the changes earlier this week). While initially I was optimistic when I heard Google’s plan back in May, calling it “huge news for content publishers,” today brings an alarming sign of the current state of the contextual advertising product.

In the post we published earlier today, “18 Smaller Olympic Countries to Root For,” the ad accompanying the story in Google Reader was the following:

What we have here is another example of a contextual advertising misfire – Google sees a lot of words about sports and automatically determines that an ad about fitness might be a good fit. But rather than fire up a PG ad for GNC or Gold’s Gym, we get the very PG-13 ad for a gay fitness site that has absolutely no place in the feed of any professional news organization.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’d have the same reaction if the ad was of a scantly clad female as well. It’s simply inappropriate given the nature of our business, and while I realize we can have this ad removed from our rotation (we can use AdSense’s site filtering features), the policy of shoot first and fix later doesn’t do much for readers that have already formed a negative brand perception based on this type of advertising showing up with our feed.

To its credit, AdSense does offer a new “Ad Review Center” that can give the publisher full control over reviewing all ads before they show up – but again, the default is “Run ads immediately,” meaning unless you disable the setting right away, you’re leaving yourself open to inappropriate ads. There has to be a better in between – manual review by us of every ad is infeasible and will hurt our earnings, but at the same time, “run ads immediately” creates situations like the one above when there is no flag for this type of content.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are taking a similar approach directly with consumers in separate announcements issued this week concerning targeted advertising - you can now opt-out of it on both company’s websites, but you’re opted-in by default. This is more understandable – asking each Internet user to opt-in to advertising before showing ads is unrealistic. Similarly, when Facebook serves those obnoxious “26 and Still Single?” ads, they have every right to do so, because if I hate them that much, I can just stop using the service.

While in those cases, it might be infeasible to have Yahoo, Google, Facebook ask permission before serving targeted ads on their own respective websites and third-party ad networks, when you are dealing with publishers, their brand, and ultimately their business, a bit more discretion should be shown in determining what type of ads are displayed. Believe it or not, we actually care.

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: About Airport Parking

20 word description: AboutAirportParking.com helps you find the best place to park at the airport with prices, maps, user reviews and more.

CEO’s Pitch: With air travel an expensive hassle these days, AboutAirportParking.com simplifies the question of where to park your car. AboutAirportParking.com lists over 400 parking lots, covering every major airport in the United States. We provide detailed information on each lot, including prices, available services and user reviews all neatly organized with maps and tips to help you find the best lot for you. In select markets you can also make a reservation to guarantee a spot and lock in online discounts.

Mashable’s Take: There are a lot of Web-based services out there that are taking on the offline parking industry in an effort to make it easier to find parking spots, especially for travelers. The fact remains that it’s a difficult industry to fully break into, given its offline presence and technological obstacles for making it a viable Web-based tool. But today we have another team that’s dedicated itself to bringing the parking industry into a useful online search tool.

About Airport Parking is a site that was borne of an idea some time ago, and is finally manifesting itself fully online. With search capabilities for parking around the world, About Airport Parking has a global reach on a very niche market. But in concentrating on the airport parking market, About Airport Parking has been able to do a few things that move it further ahead than some of the other parking search sites we’ve seen, like online reservations for parking handled directly on About Airport Parking’s site.

This particular niche in the parking industry is more likely than an independent parking lot owner in a downtown area to support things like online reservations, and as airport parking is something that can easily be planned for ahead of time, About Airport Parking doesn’t have to be as reliant on mobile or in-car navigation integration. This also means that the self-service market isn’t a likely consideration for About Airport Parking.

As this site continues to develop its feature set and automated features, I’d be interested in seeing how it could fit in with other travel services. Sites like SideStep have already integrated parking information, or personal assistant and recommendation services, as these too are beginning to move into the airport-specific travel industry.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

SecondBrain, the online content aggregator that launched a few weeks back, has added support for ten more services, including FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance. While many consider SecondBrain a FriendFeed clone of sorts, there’s more to SecondBrain’s platform than lifestreaming. It takes your aggregated content and places it in an organized, searchable context.

As you can see just by looking at the list of newly supported sites, SecondBrain supports a wide array of social bookmarking and media-sharing sites, most of which are good for individual marketing purposes once widespread redistribution gets going. A primary focus for SecondBrain is to better organize your lifestreaming content and make it easier to share this aggregated content accordingly. That means that there are things like collections, which are tailored to your preferences and have privacy setting options and more.

One of the best things about this particular format for sharing lifestreaming content is that you can still aggregate certain content into various collections and share each collection with a specific audience, depending on your needs. What this does is increase the amount of content you can share, as you won’t have to worry about any ill-gotten overlap for other catchall lifestreaming services that don’t offer such privacy options with such organization.

From there, SecondBrain is also among those that are making aggregated Web content more searchable and easy to find, hence making it easier for aggregated content to be useful in more ways than just having been shared amongst a group of friends. It’s been quite interesting to see the types of services that do this, from SecondBrain to social search engine Delver, and surely more will come in order to tackle the very specific task of turning aggregated lifestreams into more useful things, from recommendations to marketing fodder.