I'm sorry Facebook but your ad targeting systems are wildly inaccurate and reduce that valuable screen estate to the right hand side of my browser window to irrelevant line noise. Google's and Yahoo's ad targeting is pretty darn good but looking at Facebook right now offers me:

• Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
• Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I'm not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
• Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called "In Search of Location's Sweet Spot" and it's sitting in draft and not yet posted. That's because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act. Just like Anne Elk (Miss), I have a theory. I call it my Theory of Stuff. I'm sure that other people, far more learned and erudite than I, have articulated such a theory but I've yet to come across any evidence for this and for now at least, it remains mine and it contains three buckets, looking something like this:

This is an open letter to Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda and to Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart. As a British citizen who travels a lot in the US I understand that the "customer service" ethos which is so prevalent in the US doesn't travel or translate particularly well in the UK. I also understand that it's almost naive to expect that since Asda was taken over by Wal-Mart in 1999 any type of US values would transfer to the UK arm. I also understand that the UK supermarket business is highly competitive and that through Asda, Wal-Mart is competing head-to-head with Tesco, Morrison's and Sainsbury's. I understand and accept all of this.

What I do not understand and what I do not accept is the sheer bloody-mindedness and rudeness of your staff, especially those of your online retailer business.

Let me explain.

As a family we tried out Asda, as their prices are extremely competitive compared to those of their competitors, so on the 19th of October we booked a delivery slot for an online shop; the order wasn't particularly large or complex but it was still in excess of £100.00. The only delivery slot available was from 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM the following day.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on this blog that highlighted the issues around managing our digital identity.

"Managing our digital identity through those sources we know about is a challenge for a significant percentage of the online population"

Then this morning, (ex Yahoo!) Cathy Ma posted a link to her recent blog post about the Personas project being run by Aaron Zinman at MIT. Personas tries to "show you how the internet sees you". So I duly surfed over to https://personas.media.mit.edu/ and plugged in my full name and some time later a rather slick Flash animation gave me this supposed "characterization of the person".