The sidekick has been kicked off postrantrant

I have just set up a new Googlemail email account (people who know me please ask for this). I was intrigued the other day when I noticed that all the sidebar adverts were relevant to me! This spooked me out a bit – did Googlemail actually know me? Was someone sitting in the Google office reading my emails so that they could target me specifically?! The sidebar read: ‘Metaphor therapy…’; ‘cultural software: a new theory of cultural evolution explains ideology in terms of memes’; ‘ Forgiveness and acceptance: roles of forgiveness and acceptance in dissolving resentment…’; ‘Emotional literacy thesaurus and vocabulary’. 

I was sufficiently freaked out to look this up on the internet. It turns out to be ‘Contextual advertising’:

Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.

I decided to test it further by faking an email (to myself) using alt_worship terms. Unfortunately contextual advertising isn’t quite up to this yet, all it gave me was: ‘Quality Celtic shop’, ‘Train wicca – enroll free’; ‘Kit Heath Jewellery’. I was slightly surprised by this because I thought that Christian subculture would have latched onto taking advantage of this device. Of course the other alternative interpretation is that alt_worship has more in common with Wicca than with mainstream Christianity!