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Thursday, October 05, 2006

They know where we live


OK, here's a puzzle I don't quite understand. I called up an article in Britain's
Independent newspaper today, and in the sidebar was an ad for a singles dating service. The headline: find singles in Tellico Plains, with photos of three lovely young ladies supposedly from the place.

Well, Tellico Plains is a tiny town about 30 miles from here, over the mountains and the state line in Tennessee.

And this is a newspaper in the UK.

How do they know I live near Tellico Plains?

Is it because I linked to the story from Yahoo! News? And since Yahoo! knows where I live (as I'm a My Yahoo! subscriber, with localized page and an email account), do they feed that info to newspaper sites? Or is there some deal where newspapers get a special ad link from a Yahoo! link?

What's the deal?
(Note, thanks to SpaceCoastWeb's explanation in the comments. Makes sense a bit, but I don't dialup to a local ISP, although I guess they could base it on the ISP's local phone number...But that's not in Tennessee. Why don't they target here?)

(photo: near downtown Tellico Plains, Saturday)

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