... a bug report on that, for what it is worth.

If you look real close you’ll see at the bottom of the ad that it says ‘Ads by Google’. We don’t have anything to do with what ringtone ads get targeted to your blog. Google is falling down on their job, but to be fair it’s probably happening because every once in awhile Duke is discussed on a UK blog and the Mets are discussed on a Braves blog. Either way, I’ll put in a request to Google via our ad partner to block this advertiser.

Also, we’d very much appreciate it if you would keep all comments and feedback like this in our welcome post. You don’t have to do, but it would make our life a little easier to respond to everyone across the network that was migrated to the new platform last night (10 blogs!).

A problem everywhere.

A law blog I read was covering the recent resignation/lawsuit of a big Boston firm associate against her previous law firm, alleging she was drugged/raped at a firm-sponsored Christmas party. The google ad next the story was the firm-in-question’s ad with the line, “The best attorneys know how to balance agression with delicate handling.”

One other thing – when you move your old profile over, the system defaults to pacific time. If you want that changed, do it from your profile settings.

Google data mines the bejabbers out of websites it advertises on. It searches for key words, phrases, anything it can get a toe hold onto for the sake of finding potential ad matches. Unfortunately, it’s extremely diffcult to establish a data mining protocol to separate positive vs. negative associations – especially when you hope to use one protocol for every website you advertise on. (Just hop over to 3rd Saturday in Blogtober to see how difficult it can be: do you place ads for UT or UA on that site or not?)

What does this mean? Simple, as far as you’re concerned: Google picks up on the discussions of all teams in the blog but doesn’t know which ones are good v. bad for advertising purposes. So it places ads for all of them. Variety increases the odds of a response if you can assume that there isn’t an underlying factor that would dissuade a response.