I thought today would be robocall-free, and said so on Facebook. An hour later one of my little Facebook friends reported getting one. So much for that theory.
In three years of using one, I’ve received not one sales pitch, robocall, or charity solicitation on my cell phone. Not so my landline, which has become such an unwanted-call magnet I no longer answer it. But friends tell me their cell phones are not immune and that I won’t be able to hide forever.
I’m starting to see sponsored posts — advertisements formatted to look like regular posts, just like they’ve been doing in newspapers for years — on some (formerly) favorite blogs. Earlier today someone on Twitter was bitching about sponsored tweets. Damn, sponsored tweets? I thought Foursquare would be the death of Twitter. Shows you what an optimist I am!
Just today I put a new widget on the left sidebar to show what I’m reading on my Nook. Now, when I mouse over the word “Nook” in my previous post, a sponsored popup appears. That’s the absolute last thing I want to happen, and I think I’ll have to ditch the widget. Ditch the widget. I like the sound of that.
Not a day goes by two or three spambots don’t register at my blogs in order to post comment spam. So far the spam filter’s caught them all. If they were human, and not bots, they’d be smart enough to evade the filter, and then we’d all have to give up blogging . . . or maybe not, witness Twitter and Foursquare.
As bad as all this is, it’s nothing compared with the pure evil of pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
I wish there was a widget for my TV that would blank out the screen during these ads. It could key in on the way Wilford Brimley pronounces “diabeetus.” That’s one widget I wouldn’t ditch.
p.s. I didn’t ditch the widget . . . I figured out a way to kill the popup instead.