brentashley

fellow canuck alanis morissette said it ever so well: isn’t it ironic?

so here’s the lowdown. i blog this rant about HailStorm, Passport, and targeted marketing, see. the most illustrious and worthy Dave links to me. i’ve got an img ref to my own site in my footer here, so I get log hits. of course, when Dave links to ya, hits abound.

so i’m looking through these hits and whaddo i see but a visit from this one particular domain with a neato odd name based on a pretty obscure word. it so happens that this obscure word popped into a conversation on tuesday, so i had visited this very site. i take a look at it again just for interest and i see it’s home to a couple of developers, one who seems to be expert at cross-browser DHTML.

hey, says i, this guy would probably be interested in having a look at my open-source javascript library for cross-browser remote scripting. so i sends him this email, all pleasant-like, inviting him to have a boo at my doins.

then it hits me, like a tunna brix. i’ve just mined my own logs, correlated a hit to a user’s personal tastes, and sent him a targeted advertisement.

talk about ironic. i’ve been assimilated and i didn’t even know it.