On the oddities of GMail

I use Gmail for my primary at home mail provider, in part because I can access it easily from work and in part because its threading format works well for PBEM posting. And it's free. Of course, it's free in the same way that broadcast television is free - as long as I accept that I am the product being sold by Google to the advertisers everything works out fine.

But it is rather strange. Gmail sifts through your e-mail conversations for ad keywords, and then targets you with ads based on that. While this can produce much hilarity when you just needlessly repeat words to see what it will do (Bec and I toss in the word 'Yurt' repeatedly just to mess with it; did you know that you can use eco-yomes - Part Yurt, Part Dome - to take yurt tours of Hawaii?) it does mean that the advertising provides this sense of product ubiquity. Being more accustomed to non-targeted ads that never hold any interest for me it would be very easy to start tot hink that Role Playing Games had become much more popular, with the endless ads for new NPC tracking softwar, game hosting services and any number of other gamer-centric products. Keep it up long enough and I'll never see ads for any product that is not already part of my niche hobby, giving the impression that my niche hobby has taken over the world.