Blatant Advertisement

So I thought I'd toss up a couple ads that have come up on my site that caught my eye for one reason or another:

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There's something of a Ying/Yang balance going on in that advertising bar.

This advertisement has no such balance:

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Oh boy! A free weekly column from Ann Coulter! While you're at it, do you think you could rip open my hard drive and defecate inside? Or perhaps you could just sprinkle some anthrax inside the fan box and then give me a blood transfusion from an ebola-infected monkey...

And finally:

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These are almost certainly a result of my post about POLITICAL coverage. Why don't these advertisers use negative keywords like "political" and "campaign" and save themselves a few bucks and from annoying people by bombarding them with insurance ads?

Irony, Thy Name is AdWords...

Yesterday after work I was messing around with the various customizable features offered by Google Blogger. It is that experimentation you have to thank for the link to my YouTube videos, my bio, and some news feeds to the right of the blog. On a whim, I signed up to host some "highly targeted ads" powered by Google's AdSense - lauded to be the best thing to happen to advertising since the Budweiser frogs.

Receiving notification this morning that my page had been approved to host ads, I scrolled to the bottom to find this carefully targeted, highly topical advertisement.

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Well played, Google, well played. Although unless Marion Jones is checking the blogosphere on articles about herself, I don't expect many click throughs...