Adnormal?

One of the things I've learned about recently, while building a website, is advertising.  I've learned that a lot of internet advertising (ads by Google, for example) is contextual.   Google use the words that are on the page to determine which advert to place there.  Today, I wrote about dancing, and dancing related adverts appeared on that page within seconds.  Another popular form of advertising is behavioural targeting, as used by Facebook, in which contextual advertising is further refined by using data from the user's past click-stream (ads that they have clicked on).

These are all adverts that have been targeted specifically at me.  I am perplexed.  Does anyone else have an advert profile as strange as mine?

To see the picture in its full size, click on it.

7 Reasons

If you're getting a sense of deja vu, you read the wrong blog first.  If you're not getting a sense of deja vu and are now a bit confused, allow me to explain.

I'm launching a new blog tomorrow, in collaboration with Jonathan Lee of jollyinterestingstuff.blogspot.com/.  It's called 7 Reasons and is based around a simple concept.  Every day we will provide you with 7 Reasons.  They could be 7 Reasons that all water should be sparkling, 7 Reasons that otters are better than cats, 7 Reasons that women should stay out of the loft (I'm definitely doing that one), the scope of this blog will be almost without limit.

It's a high-concept blog, but one that we think should be consistently entertaining, amusing and occasionally even relevant and topical.

We hope that you come and join us here.  We welcome all suggestions, comments, criticism (of Jon), ideas and contributions.  We can also be found on Twitter.

We start at 11am tomorrow.  If you enjoy it, please publicise it via Facebook, Twitter, word of mouth, or even pushing notes under your neighbours' doors if you're less technically minded, we'd really like to get this out to a large audience.  Obviously, as a reader of my blog you already have special 7 Reasons silver status, you get gold status for contributing and platinum status for contributing and publicising.   Now I'm getting deja vu.  

Jonathan Trott is on Facebook!

Remember Federico Macheda, the seventeen year old Manchester United striker who scored a sensational injury time winner on his debut against Aston Villa last season? He suddenly went from the obscurity of the reserve team to become very famous and popular indeed. One of the consequences of his new found fame was that he received thousands of friend requests on Facebook.

When Jonathan Trott made his terrific England debut last week it occured to me that he might also get inundated with Facebook friend requests, so I got mine in early. To my surprise it was accepted quite quickly. I've taken a screenshot of his profile page and posted it here in case you're not lucky enough to have your friend request accepted.

If you click on the image, it will become bigger.