Mental Kindling - Scott Hayne

Won’t last long… Get it before the Smithsonian does. http://ow.ly/1oQns

Vintage dehumidifier from the Roosevelt administration. This appliance has seen things that would make your eyes bleed, son. It is from the greatest generation of dehumidifiers. Sure, today’s dehumidifiers have fancy lcd screens and energy star ratings. Energy star? Sh*t, this dehumidifier defeated the Nazis, you think it cares about how much electricity it uses! Your power meter will spin so fast your house may fly away. 

Includes: 

Water reservoir bucket full of blood, sweat, and tears. And cobwebs. 

Janky cord with fresh electrical tape. 

Warranty: 

I warranty this dehumidifier might light up your basement like the Fourth of July and leave a 5 foot hole in your foundation when it explodes. And you will be honored that it exploded in your basement. 

Actually I plugged it in and I didn’t electrocute myself and there were no fireballs. In fact it hummed steadily and quietly like it probably did as a younger appliance. Which is why I am selling it - where is the excitement in that. 

Price: 

One dollar. Cash only. No coins please.

Completing the census sure is easy when you live by yourself. So that is a plus.

From a David Brooks op-ed in the Times: “We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality…”

This morning on Meet The Press he followed up by commenting that we are becoming a country of people that are only comfortable when we can make our options appear to be 180 degrees from one another.  

Sounds super productive, huh?

Google is launching a Beta of it’s new AdWords Remarketing service.  In a nutshell it works like this:

1. You visit a site via an AdWords search advertisement (or possibly even visit the site directly)
2. Surf around the site without completing a pre-defined conversion goal (purchasing an item, making a reservation, etc).
3. Via your IP and a cookie placed during that visit - Google will be able to recognize you as you visit other sites on their content network in the future (their content network is huge, you can’t avoid it)
4. Google blasts you with ads related to that conversion/website until you cave in and just go buy the damn thing.

Prior to making this official, I had always understood that simply by installing Google Analytics on your site, they had the capacity to do this and other than their general “don’t be evil” mantra, you had no guarantees they wouldn’t.  As such, I made the recommendation not to use Google Analytics on our corporate site and opted for Omniture SiteCatalyst - in function, a very similar tool, but a paid for service with data ownership.

My worry was that if a user visited our site and say, viewed the cardiology page - then Google decided to start serving them ads related to heart disease - if the user drew the conclusion between their recent visit to our site and this new abundance of oddly topical advertisements - we would look like the bad guys.

Well, it is here and it is hailed as a service, and for the record I have had my first encounter.  Looking for a place to stay near Chicago last week, I checked availability at Harrahs casino hotel in Joliet.  I have seen no less than a dozen banner ads for that casino across half a dozen sites since then - specifically for Harrahs in Joliet…

Don’t be evil, be annoying.