I Knew It

About a month ago, I posted here that I was getting creeped out lately about how personal those banner ads seem to be getting. I posted a few screen captures from dictionary-type sites as examples, since these sites seem pretty harmless when you are visiting them.

Now today I read this article in the Wall Street Journal. It exposes the burgeoning industry of harvesting secrets from our computers. The kicker is that the top culprit they mention is none other than Dictionary.com. "A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal's test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users."

Morplee

I challenge you to try to finish Morplee without putting in 20 minutes of hard work and getting a surprising sense of accomplishment.

Goldie's Revenge

Goldie's Revenge.

Quite possibly the easiest flash game we have come across. But the kids still enjoyed completing it. Good for 15 minutes of fun.

Targeted Ads

Ok, I'm starting to get a little creeped out by the targeted banner ads.

I bought a porch swing from porchswings.com. Now everywhere I go, I am seeing ads for porchswings.com in my browser. Not only that, it's the exact swing that I bought. And if you click through, it says that swing is no longer available. My dead swing is stalking me on the internet:

Notice on the above page, it's in two different places on the page!

Do they really think I'm going to go back and buy another porch swing? And how did all these other sites get a hold of my browsing history? Or even worse, my purchasing history!

Then I went to look at a platform bed, and now guess what keeps showing up in my banner ads?

Yep, same bed. When did these ads get so good?

AAAAAAAGGGGH!!