An irregular, irreverent, post-modern account of the surreal, the ordinary, and the bizarre happenings on and around the Felia lavender farm in Crete

Sunday, October 08, 2006

ADSENSE

It has this really intelligent sounding name does the google program for generating ads to put on your blog or web site page: google adsense. The idea is that it "reads" the page that the ads are to appear on and tailors advertisements from appropriate advertisers on things mentioned in the text of the page. Sounds good huh?

Well not so fast. Slow down, I wrote a blog entry a few days back that expressed my cynicism about the value and contribution of charities to the well-being of the world. To be fair I came down pretty heavily "agin 'em". Next day and what adverts are appearing on my blog? Adverts from charities that's what.

The Old Git wrote a strong anti-religious piece in his blog at around the same time and guess what? Yup, he got ads from religious organisations on his blog the next day.

So it looks as though we can both end up hosting ads for things that we disapprove of simply by writing harshly about them. So tell me google tell me do - where's the "sense" in that? Adsense or nonsense?

I wonder whether I'll have ads for adsense tomorrow?

3 comments:

  1. If you think that's stupid, wait until you hear the story about the guy who fitted SatNav equipment to his vehicle to drive across mainland Europe but regularly got lost on the French autoroutes! What a drongo! An introduction to his risible tale can be found here.

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  2. ha, i just left the following on dear liam's blog re his islam rant and the ads shown:

    "gah, i hate most advertising...digital slimeballs in trenchcoats mostly, trying to sell you or your children something you don't need, by opening said coats in some dim lit alley and saying, "comehere, you can't do without this..."

    and to see the google adsense above this post for "Islam" and "Islam Religion" may even be ironic...i don't know as i will not click on the links thereby engendering some payment to take place...

    google's motto "don't be evil" is being stretched thin by the love of mammon"

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  3. i did do a blogrant on google a while ago, when they started up in china:

    http://tinyurl.com/f9232

    i generally like google, and use them all the time for a variety of things...and am quite happy with what they do for me...mostly...so i have mixed emotions in criticising them too harshly, but no company should be above principals...it's a bit hard sometimes to parse what those principals should be, given there are no absolutes...but if you set the bar by saying "don't be evil" and get it mostly right...i think it's ok for a little criticism once in a while

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