Google Me Google

Google has become something of smash hit. It is due, in fact, to the success of google that I am writing this blog. When I started seeing so much news about Google, I decided that I had to explore Google. I had to understand what they were doing and why.

I got a gmail account, I got a blog on blogger.com, I downloaded Picasa2. With all of these I'm impressed. The gmail account was interesting. I really like the fact that Google get's the fact that information should not be destroyed. It should be searched. IBM thinks keeping data around is a big waste. So emails disappear from your inbox after three months. I hate that. IBM get's angry when my email file gets close to 300MB. Google gives me 2GB of space for free. Hmmmm....

So I am corresponding with my friend and we are trying to decide on a restaurant in Boulder. And as the back forth emails and replys gets going I begin to notice advertisements in the right hand side of my email for, you guessed it, resaurants in Boulder.

So I read the T&C's and, with certainty, Google's robots read my email and dish up advertisements based on who they think I am. Interesting.

So then, I have an idea. You can set up your blog to send your postings to an email address. So I set it up to send each posting I make to my google email address. And then I look at the advertisements generated by the google in response to my posting. That turned out to be great fun. One of them had psychologists, suicide prevention and loneliness counsling advertisements. Ha Ha! I wonder what advertisments this post will generate?