BREAKING NEWS: Iain Dale encourages his readers to convert to Islam
Dear readers,
Having just visited Iain Dale’s blog, I must sadly report that he has suddenly decided to make it a personal mission to encourage his readers to convert to Islam. His recent post on banning the burka sparked a huge debate in his comments section, much as it did when I addressed the issue on this blog. However, the adverts now appearing on his blog seem to be some form of subliminal messaging aimed at enticing his readers into becoming Muslims. The evidence is as follows:
EXHIBIT A: When scrolling down the sidebar on Iain’s blog after reading his post on burkas, I was horrified to see that – contrary to the line that he took in his blogpost – he wants his readers to buy hijabs for themselves!! Outrageous!! The low prices available on eBay are clearly an attempt by Iain to promote these garments to his readers on a national, if not international scale.
EXHIBIT B: As if trying to get his readers to buy hijabs wasn’t bad enough, he is also pushing his readers towards Muslim dating agencies. Just above his original blogpost rallying against the burka, Iain Dale has the cheek to advertise an agency for single Muslims using a picture of a woman with her face covered!! Outrageous!!
EXHIBIT C: Then, would you believe it, I log back onto Iain’s blog a short while later, only to see this new advert instead:
I shall be contacting Mr Dale as a matter of urgency to express my disgust at these shameless antics that rely on psychological manipulation and covert advertising techniques. He should know better.
Regards
A.Tory
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P.S. Let this be a warning to all those who use contextual advertising…..
Witanagemot Blogs
Great spot
Gotta love Google & its contextual algorithms for delivering Adverts…
Although, actually, this does give strength to the argument that merely discussing these issues promotes them by giving platforms to Burka manufacturers and fellow travelers…
Yes, but the irony was that Iain wasn’t overly complimentary about burkas and very much shared my view that they should be banned – yet he ended up supplying adverts for them!
That would be Irony TM, Google 2009…
Adsense does/did allow you to block certain categories of advert from appearing on your site. Is this still the case and, if so LFAT, what categories would you block? Snuff kitty porn, obviously, but what else?
Seriously, what would and indeed should bloggers stop being advertised on their sites? I’m in favour of anything blocking hypocristy and yet it seems that Google’s Adsense has no hypocrisy/real context (I’m slagging off X but mentioning it so don’t mention X on my site) filters…
I think contextual ads are very dangerous. Lots of big political bloggers have been accused of heresy for having adverts promoting causes that their party faithful readers don’t agree with, including Iain Dale (I think this tends to happen through Messagespace, the collaborative advertising machine that the big blogs all go along with). Personally, I like complete control of anything and everything that appears on my site. I think Google adsense does allow you to block things that you don’t agree with, but even still I’m conscious of having too much advertising on my site and the crude nature of how adsense works also puts me off.
It’s not like I get enough readers to make serious cash out of advertising in any case!
I think Google adsense does allow you to block things that you don’t agree with
On the other hand, it highlights both the difficulties with machine-context-recognition in that if I say ‘kiddie p*rn is wrong’ I will still generate an inbound hit for the phrase ‘k*ddie p*rn’ but the overall *context* of my reference to that subject is lost.
I do know of one firm down here near Brighton (I can’t remember the name! Curse my MS and the cannabis I use to address its more egregious symptoms!) offering a blog-based contextual search that will show Brands whether people are talking about them positively or negatively. I can’t recall their name right now but they had interesting maths/english behind them and their product worked. That might help in that if the software could detect if I was saying that kiddie p*rn was a good thing that would be naughty whereas if I castigated it and it’s ancient Greco-Roman origins, that would be okay and publish accordingly.
The company is Brand Watch – Brand Watch – I’ve now got contacts for the MD should you lot be interested!
Its a clever tech but like the longsword – you could use it for good or ill (I’ve been trying or did try to get various bits of the Secret State to use it for meta-analysis of intentions!).
(comment deleted for breaking the rules of this blog)
LFAT, you and your commentators are just too intellectual for the common herd.
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