The Conical Glass: Hitting the target

Friday, October 05, 2007

Hitting the target

In the recent news reports about Google's acquisition of online ad firm DoubleClick, many privacy advocates are concerned about the use of Internet users' data. "Will Google combine the two data systems to map not only what someone searches for, but also which sites they visit, videos they watch and ads they click across the Web in order to better target marketers' promotions?" asks this article on Cnet News.

Right now, my attitude is: bring on the targeted ads. For some reason, the amount of spam that I'm getting has really picked up lately, to between 300-400 emails a day. It all goes into gmail's spam folder, but because of the occasional false positive, which happens maybe 2-3 times per week, I need to quickly scan the subject lines before I delete it all. What I've found is that approximately 75% of my spam is about penis enlargement. (It could even be higher than that; a lot of my spam is in Korean and Chinese and other languages I don't read.) Here's a quick sample of today's missives, so you can see what I'm confronted with every single day:

80% of women think their partners penis is small
93% of women do not mention small penis size, for fear of hurting their lovers' feelings
94% of women agree a larger penis is a visual turn-on
(I'm sure that those statistics are based on in-depth scientific investigations.)
ladies like em big, so i enlarged my cock just to please them
hey man, your girl feel down with your shorterPenis, our herbal pill can longer
Any bigger and i would be in a circus
(That's right -- Giant Penis Man is always the highlight of every Barnum & Bailey Big Top.)
Making your woman happy is very important for repeated sexual encounters
Tired of being ashamed of your penis size? Leave it for losers!
Take care of you and your penis!

Anyway, I hate to break it to the spammers, but I don't have a penis. If the subject lines were actually relevant to me ("96% of dog owners think their dogs are absolutely precious! Doesn't your pet deserve Vaxadog nutritional supplements?"; "Tired of bad NPR reception? Our new antenna is 63% longer than the competition!"), then it would make this daily chore less onerous. Google is taking over the world, and I for one welcome our new advertising overlords.

posted by 125records @ 2:03 PM

2 Comments:

At 5:44 PM, yellojkt said…

I'd offer you mine, but I might need it again sometime.
At 7:32 PM, neal said…

Bet your web stats go up a lot this week :)

Hey, my word verification is dikhufqn, which looks almost like something, particularly after reading your post.

neal