I hate advertising in general and having had no TV for a couple years and a Tivo before that, living in a state with no billboards, the do not call list, and with Gmail's great spam filter my dislike for them has gotten even worse. Anyhow, I find that I do not mind well targeted ads, though, and even kind of enjoy them. I guess the key word is "well" in that sentence and that if the volume were too high even helpful ads would be irritating. Still better than untargeted ones.
How do you guys feel about them? I'd be more than willing to spend a fair amount of time filling in preference, need, and price preference information to get better ads, provided some attempt was made at privacy (tough online, but at least your name, address, and telephone #). I've rated a lot of Netflix movies and have been pretty happy with their systems performance (although it could definitely be much better - but that's another topic), so I appreciate the potential of recommendation systems.
Telemarketers were the worst (and I always felt the need to be civil - I blame my upbringing), but now that's all but stopped so it's spam. If a spam message actually made it through Gmail's filters and I somehow read it before automatically trashing it, and then was improbably interested in their product, I'd go online and find a competitor to give the business instead. Now that's a seriously bad spam PR problem!
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