I live in a town
with a great little cheese shop — Marshall’s in Dobbs Ferry, NY to give them a
plug.  They’re having a wine and cheese tasting next week, so this morning I
wrote to a friend in town to ask if he and his wife are going.  I use AOL for my
personal email.  When you check your mail through the web, they throw a
skyscraper ad next to it. 

As Google and Yahoo, among others, have shown, the
technology to make that ad relevant to me — they have account info for
demos/geography and they can take a glance at the contents of the email and
serve an ad that might resonate: wine.com, Gouda World, whatever. 

Instead, I
got an ad for a Rigid power drill, with 23% more torque.  Does Rigid have
research that shows a high correlation between wine and cheese tasters and
people who drill holes in cement?  Does the AOL inference engine think cheese
> Swiss cheese > holes > drills?  Is AOL just calling me a wussy?  I
for one am starting to be so used to contextual advertising that when it is
this missing, it’s actually shocking.

Matt Rosenberg