MySpace Will Use Member Info To Tailor Ads

The Skinny is Keach Hagey's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.

The New York Times reports that executives at Fox Interactive Media, the New Corporation unit that owns MySpace, have been tinkering for about six months with technology that can tailor ads to the personal information of its 110 million active users.

The company plans to unveil its "completely new paradigm" of online advertising to investors today.

"We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life's passions of our users," said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media.

Of course, privacy advocates are miffed that these stated life's passions are being used to sell stuff to the passionate folks who naively entered the information without knowing what it would be used for.

The new program is expected to boost MySpace's profits from $40 million a month to $70 million a month by next year - not a minute too soon for the networking site that's quickly losing ground to Facebook.

But outside of bigger profits for the site's owners and advertisers, how much will really change about the MySpace user experience? My hunch is not that much.

Right now, MySpace's current, less sophisticated advertising model assumes everyone logging on is a sex-obsessed teenager and tries to sell them all condoms and dating services.

My guess is that this guess was essentially right, and after a thorough reading of 110 million profiles, the contents of the new, targeted ads will change very little.

Tobacco Farming Makes A Comeback

In the age of the every-spreading smoking ban, it may be hard to believe, but tobacco farming is making a big comeback among U.S. farmers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Three years after the federal government stopped subsidizing it, the crop is gaining new popularity among farmers. Cheaper U.S. tobacco has become competitive as an export, sating surging nicotine cravings in China, Russia and Mexico.

Even without subsidies and with high labor costs, tobacco is much more profitable that corn. One farmer said he can net up to $1,800 an acre from 150 acres of tobacco, compared with $250 an acre from corn.

The profitability of tobacco has spiced up debate over the farm bill that Congress is preparing to take up. Critics of agricultural subsidies can point to tobacco as evidence that subsidies are unnecessary.

At least when you are growing a crop that's some doctors say is as addictive as heroin.

An Evolutionary Explanation For Morality (And The "Moral Majority")

Could morals be the result of our species' evolution as social beings?

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book "The Happiness Hypothesis," thinks so. And, the New York Times reports, his theory has some interesting implications for religion and politics.

Haidt began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust, testing people's reaction to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it became roadkill. In these experiments, he explored "moral dumbfounding" - "when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why that is."

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate systems: moral intuition, which we had before our species developed language, and moral judgement, which only came after people could articulare why something was right or wrong. He thinks we've spent much too much time focusing on the "elephant rider" of moral judgement, when the real moral work is done by the "elephant" of moral intuition.

Armed with this suggestion that the "elephant" might be something we all share regardless of culture, he then identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures: do no physical harm, do as you would have done to you, have respect for authority, maintain loyalty to the in-group and protect purity and sanctity.

The first two components, which are concerned with the protection of individuals, get greater emphasis in Western societies. In other societies, selfishness is suppressed through "practices, rituals and stoires that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity," Haidt said.

He then asked people to identify their political leanings on a liberal-conservative spectrum and rank the importance of the five moral components. He found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals - those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. Liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group: loyalty, respect for authority and purity.

Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems, but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.

Haidt believes many disagreements between liberals and conservative reflect the different emphases placed on the five moral categories. He argues that societies need people with both types of personality.

"A liberal morality will encourace much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital," he said. "I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco - most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement."

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