Google second guessing us?
March 11th I wrote about Google, blogger and language. I have had a few responses to this. Desbladet comments on the connection between content and advertising:

The search engine lives and dies by associating content with key words. Their advertising model does, too - I understand that they're good enough at this to charge more than the going rate in the industry and I dare you to claim to be surprised.

The conclusion is that the value of content increases, as I observed in February.

Ezter Hargittai, Ph.D. student at Princeton University, disagrees with that conclusion in her blog. In an email, she points me to her post about how local google sites second guess users. Her conclusion is that google sees where we log in from, and generate ads due to the log-in. That is a logical but unsettling claim, as it does bad things to anonymity, but I am not entirely certain that she is correct.

I can't use this blog as a test-case, since I pay to keep it ad-free, but I have a few others. Blogonblog is for instance managed by me and Jill, written in English, and yes, the ad is in English. Trial and error, the blog I post to when I play around with templates, is in both languages, and there the ad is in Norwegian. Interestingly enough the ad in notater, Torill, the blog I use when I post things for lectures, is in English - or it was at the time I checked. The writing there is in Norwegian, and I post to it from Norway, but in this case, neither assumption seems to be correct.

I guess the conclusion is that google is doing stuff to integrate blogger and use it to sell ads... not sure exactly what yet.

(update: at 15.00 my time the language in the ads in "notater, Torill" is danish, which comes pretty close...)