Saturday, I received a message that someone had signed my guestbook. An entry? In my guestbook? Wonderful! Of course, I immediately went up on line to see it. Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn�t a note of support. It wasn�t a note of criticism. It wasn�t anything associated with me at all. It was an ad�an ad for an Ohio landscaping company.

How annoying! I expect advertising with my newspaper and television, I tolerate it (barely) over my telephone, but I refuse to have it on my guestbook. I thought and thought and finally remembered (or figured out anew, I am not sure which) how to delete entries. It then took almost no time to delete it It�s gone but not forgotten.

That a landscaping company would want to use me as a forum for an ad is laughable. It shows how limited virtual reality is. Anyone who was truly in touch with my reality would never view me or anything that is mine as an advertisement for landscaping. The bushes are over-running the house again. The pricker weeds are taking over the flower beds. The grass needs mowing and the renegade buckthorn needs removal again. My diary, on the other hand, has neat and tidy graphics while my guestbook has those nice little ticky-tacky entry squares that everyone has, a real suburbia of entries. No wonder the company was mislead.

I haven�t seen the guy�s ads on any other guestbook. At first, I wondered if I got lucky because I was a Midwesterner. Then I remembered that any real Midwesterner would know that Wisconsin was not even contiguous to Ohio and that Milwaukee was nowhere near Cincinnati. I then considered whether he picked me out because he believed that anyone who likes to play with hair must like a tidy lawn. In my experience, however, hair can be a lot of colors but none of them are green�at least not naturally unless Kat has been swimming in chlorinated pools too often. Mowing bears little natural relationship to clipping hair except that they both require sharp objects.

If my guestbook is a suitable place for Cincinnati landscaping ads, what other profiles does it fit? Do we have profiling for guestbooks? Are my entries now to be searched for potential advertising links? Are hairagomi and Chiquita about to join the advertising fray? You can be sure that the first company that tries to advertise an oven or an iron will meet the same fate as the landscaping guy, probably even more quickly.

Beware! It could happen to you because it seems that Diaryland is now �Ads R Us��and those stealth ads could be coming to a guestbook near you.

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