Crumpled

I know I promised waterboarding, and more stuff about Gothla. Well, this is my blog, and it is slave to my whims. I will probably never follow up on those posts. If I felt I had to, I might never blog again. That's what you get for reading.

Today I'm going to talk about banner ads for dating sites. The one that say stuff like "Meet singles in Sacramento" or some other town that you happen to be in or near while browsing the web. You see these on myspace or torrent search sites. If you actually look for porn (not that you have to) you are pretty much guaranteed one of these banner ads.

The simple ones just have some text that has your location. The better ones render a new image that has your location written into the image. That makes it look like maybe there is an entire website dedicated to people in your town flirting with eachother, and the model in the photo probably lives just a few miles from you. Um.... sorry guy, it's not true.

Creating these images is actually pretty easy, and if I ever did follow up posts I'd probably make one for you, but for now I'm just going to describe how those images get made and how you can have fun with the ones you encounter.

First, whenever you request a resource on the internet, the http server that supplies the resource has access to your IP address (the address of your computer on the internet). That IP address is fed to a database that has associated physical locations. These locations aren't specific enough to know where you live but are usually specific enough to know what city you are in. Sometimes they aren't even that perfect and will think that you live in a city nearby.

Next the advertiser has to feed that location into the advertisment being served up. It is technically possible for code to be in the image that does the location lookup (geocoding) and write out the name of your town as a word, but most images accept city names as text and leave the geocoding part to something else. This means the request for the image has the city name in the URL or the filename for the image. This also means that we can use these ad servers to create images with our own words by modifying the URL.

Here are some I've made by feeding words to an ad that showed up on a bittorrent tracker site:

There you go. Whenever you find images like these, you can right click them to get their properties, and paste thier locations into your web browser. Sometimes you have to navigate to the images in your browser before you can see the geolocation location information in the URL. Once you are there though, you can load all kinds of words into the URLs.

Here is the link to the image in this example so you can play with it. (if you want) http://crtv.mate1.com/crtv/1751/geolocation=Rehab

Have fun.