Kill your browser

This drives the people who are trying to make money off the web completely bonkers. Advertisers, and web content producers who want the advertisers' money, are all too aware of the Web's present limitations. Unlike television, where ads appear at regular intervals, or magazines which use ads not only as filler but often as their primary content (see GQ, Vogue), people surfing the web have to actively choose to view advertisements. There's no passive, subliminal floating of some commercial message into your cerebellum; you have to use your clicking finger and abandon whatever you were doing to find out about advertised products.

Enter "push" technology. Taking their cue from an advertising model with proven results - television - advertisers and web producers are finding ways to turn the passive "banner" ads that currently grace web sites into active content channels.

The tamest form of this are animated banners that wink and grin to catch your eye. Soon, much more interactive banners crafted from Java (a programming language that allows fully functional programs to be transmitted to your computer) will appear. One particularly aggressive banner I spotted allows you to actually play "Pong" while a little advertising message zips along in the background.

PointCast (www.pointcast.com), a technology from EDS incorporated, takes a more novel and interesting approach: soft-pedaling the ads by mixing them with content. PointCast is the ultimate in "push" technology, actively downloading both ads and information onto your computer on a regular schedule, and then displaying those ads (along with article "teasers") as your computer's screen saver.

On the surface, it seems like a great deal: you get news from CNN, Reuters, The New York Times and many other sources, in exactly the categories (arts, sports, current events, etc.) you choose, downloaded to the computer literally as it happens-for free! However, every moment you use PointCast (or passively watch it as it saves your screen) a cute little animated advertisement runs in the corner of your screen. Every animated ad is a colorful doormat for one corporate web site or another, and every article urges you to launch onto the article source's web site - in other words, every ad is a path back to the Internet. And instead of the static banners you saw before, adorable animated movies (all at least 30 seconds in length) accost you ceaselessly. And each ad is specifically picked to fit with the content you are reading, just like beer ads n' football on TV.

Other people are jumping on PointCast's bandwagon as we speak. Berkeley Software, makers of the popular After Dark screen saver, aren't about to let PointCast eat their lunch. After Dark Online is available free for use, though the content pales by comparison to PointCast's heavy hitters. Meanwhile Microsoft's ActiveX programming language allows Web designers to reprogram your Internet Explorer browser, making PointCast-like techniques available without requiring a separate application.

So while your television is turning into the Web (via WebTV), your Web is turning into television. Far from being an alternative to television, PointCast instead dumbs down print media, shortening most articles to less than 400 words. And every article leads you back onto the 'net in one form or another. Soon we'll feel less like surfers, and more like rats in the media maze.