The Pudding Media Misconception

Bloggers have a foul taste in their mouth over Pudding Media receiving $8 million in funding. The idea is, like Google reads your e-mails and search queries, Pudding Media will listen to your VOIP phone calls and serve you contextual ads around keywords they extract. The misconception is that these ads will be served by some kind of computer-voice-thing.

Pudding Media will listen to your calls and pick out keywords, but the ads are displayed on your computer, in the Pudding Media interface. At least, that's how I understand it. I don't think that's horrible. Think about using Skype for free, but it shows you ads based around what you're talking about. No biggie.

To quell your privacy woes, they don't actually record your conversations. They don't even save the keywords gathered from your conversations. Each new call starts an entirely new session - where they know nothing about you.

I think it could be quite useful, actually. Just as sponsored search results in Google are useful.