I just added Google ads into the right side column. I was going to write something justifying it, but I changed my mind. Screw it, I don't think any of that is necessary. I do have a fairly pricey box that this is hosted on, sublet to a few of my friends as well but still carry a fair amount every month. If I can defray some of that with these ads, fine. If nothing ever happens, I don't care. I think it is funny that the very first time I looked at the main page, it had two ads relates to "balsa wood airplanes", I guess because I mentioned that in the post about CJUG a few weeks back. It was different on the recent writeback page. Now I might look around a little, just to see of the different top level categories have dramatically different ads.

This does seem like a fairly sophisticated approach that might actually approach the holy grail of serving people the ads they want to see. There are plenty of things I find out about too late, shows that I would have attended or things I would have bought that I never found out about. If no one ever follows an ad ever, it will still be interesting to see what ads are served out.

UPDATE - After browsing through a number of my category links, it seems to be doing a very good job of presenting ads actually appropriate to the subject matter on that page. I can see for the pages I was getting public service ads, Google is now crawling them. Presumably over time all these ads will be getting better and better. For now, it must just be using whatever it already has in its cache for this site.