Posthuman Blues

I just checked my Mars book's Amazon.com ranking and discovered, to my dismay, that I'm unwittingly helping to advertise, among other things, "The Passion of the Christ" DVD and a website all about Revelations and the end of the world, Fundy-style.

The problem: poorly written software. Amazon's pages are smart enough to detect keywords in a book's title and connect them to other items of possible interest, but they lack a sense of context. Thus, a book about Mars (that happens to have the word "apocalypse" in the title) generates a list of "related" products, even if they have nothing to do with it -- indeed, even if they appeal to an opposing demographic.

I know Amazon can do better because I took a quick look at Blogger's "get paid for ads on your website" scheme and they're careful to hype their software's context-recognition ability. (This must be fairly new, because I remember when BlogSpot sites hosted unsolicited ads in place of a proper nav-bar, I'd sometimes get hilarious results. While chronicling the wad of airbag fabric known as the "bunny" after the Mars Exploration Rovers landed, for example, I'd see recurring text-ads for rabbit slippers. Or I'd post a harangue about Precious Moments figurines and within minutes Posthuman Blues had been turned into a virtual billboard for the damned things.)