[Leica] Image stolen from Lluis?

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

OK, I think I've figured it out. The largest image in the screen shot I 
posted, the man and the woman, appeared yesterday in full-frame form when I 
was clicking through Lluis's flickr album. Now I realize that when I do so, 
every few images I get an advertisement, something I had never noticed 
before. At first glance, if you click through rapidly, the image in the ad 
could be mistaken for an album image. Not having realized that the image was 
an ad, I was taken aback to see the same image in an ad on Yahoo! today, and 
now I'm realizing that a number of the ads I encountered in flickr also 
appear in my Yahoo! window.

This is surely targeted advertising, as the ads are not placed only by big 
and wealthy companies such as might dominate multiple streams. Something in 
my cookies folder, or demographics file somewhere, identifies me as a likely 
target for certain ads, and Yahoo, or my ISP, or someone, gets paid to place 
the appropriate ad in front of my eyeballs. You have to admire the 
cleverness of this, but it's annoying and intrusive. I noticed this sort of 
thing once before?after I had done a search and a few site visits for some 
product, can't recall what, I started seeing banner and sidebar ads for this 
kind of product in all manner of web activities, and it went on for days 
before, I suppose, becoming too non-current and being replaced by random 
background ads.

Sorry for the false alarm. But since I was able to think of it, and the 
technology exists to bring it about, expect to see it eventually: an image 
that you viewed recently will appear as a personalization of an ad on a 
website you're viewing, in the hope of attracting a click from you. Ain't 
technology grand?

?howard