Taxonomy

By some of the links I have put up today, you can tell I have been catching up on my blogospheric meanderings. I just finished reading a post by Bob Geiger and I laughed out so loud I had just had to write about it.

In Here's How Fringe I Am, Fred Thompson, Bob describes his fringieness. Here's a sample :

• Attended my son's middle-school orientation. He's "graduating" from elementary school this Thursday -- though, oddly enough, exhibiting few signs of being a "fringe element" despite having me for a father -- and on that day, our lunatic activities will center around taking many pictures of him and his friends and going for ice cream afterwards. I personally plan on ordering the Cookies and Communist Crunch.




• Volunteered at a local community clean-up effort to rid our town of the trash spawned by a predominantly-Democratic community that clearly hates America. Went to weenie roast afterwards… Put catsup on my hotdog to show how much I despise American values.

My favorite :

• Took my son to the driving range with me. While we whacked golf balls, we discussed our lack of family values and my little boy stunned me with this question: "Dad, why haven't you been divorced a bunch of times like Fred Thompson and the other Republican presidential candidates?" "Now son," I said. "Senator Thompson's only been divorced once. You're thinking of Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich."

Of course, I can not not quote the punchline : So that's about it. I only regret that we didn’t have time to burn an American flag this week.

Harrumph!

In John McCain, Google and the politics of advertising, Part 1, I explained how web crawlers work, why they like sites created with Drupal and how Google, the world's largest search engine, has not just successfully married web crawling with contextual advertising, but has become the de facto operating system for all online propaganda campaigns, including politics.

In this second part, I'll try to explain why McCain's ad keeps popping on our site.

So back to the McCain ad.

GoogleAdwords is a contextual advertising network. What this means is that Google uses their search technology to find through all it's publishers the best ad real estate for their clients. This is what Google has to say about the program (emphasis mine):

AdWords lets you create simple, effective ads and display them to people already searching online for information related to your business. So how is it possible to show your ads only to the most relevant audiences? The answer is keyword-based advertising.

When a searcher visits Google and enters a query — say, 'good beginner guitars' — Google will display a variety of relevant search results, such as links to articles containing guitar purchasing advice, or websites dedicated to novice musicians. It will also display AdWords ads that link to online businesses selling guitars, music lessons, or other products and services related to the query.

Given we have an easily searchable, keyword rich site, this means the McCain people must have bought a lot of keywords that have to do with elections, politics and the man himself. Now, the big question is : why would it appear on my personal page as well as the politics sites?

Rubyji is not the only one to have noticed the John McCain ads that have been popping on the site lately.

Last week I got pinged by Azi Paybarah, a fellow political journo-blogger for New York Observer's The Politicker. I guess Azi needed to check out how babelicious I am and was perusing my (soon to be updated) bio at lizasabater.com.

To his horror, he found this :

Yes, that's a John McCain ad right next my mug.

Now, there's the "sensible" explanation for this freakish political mashup and then there's the conspiracy theory. The explanation, though, will shed light into some of my web development skills and the techniques I have used to develop my sites.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee, pull up a chair and get yourself comfortable. Some major geekatude is coming your way.

The Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People | Carnival of Feminists XIII. Lorraine submitted her article, I am failing my race.

First off, I think carnivals are a great way to condense every months what's happening around the different blogospheres that are popping like corn all over the web. But by the way they have been developed, I have never felt they actually are that effective after the carnival is done.

Here's my reasons why :