I read today that Facebook is introducing an advertising approach called sponsored stories, in which comments you post about products and services could be repurposed into ads for those products and services and shown to your “friends”.
Here’s my question to all you Facebook users out there. Is that what you signed up for?
This is my second attempt at this post. The first one had links to two articles but when I published the post, my text was invaded by all kinds of strange symbols. I’m sure it’s just some kind of glitch, but this time I’ve omitted the links. I’m sure Mr. Google can help you if you’d like to refer to the articles.
UPDATE: After publishing this post, I see that my blog is not looking right at all. There are symbols in with the text. Oh Oh. I don’t know what the problem is. In the morning, I’ll look at the blog on a different computer. Do you see what I see?
27th Street 
Mr. Ford seems to have moved on to other things. Your blog looks good to me.
I used to write a lot of reviews on Amazon, and I will probably post a few more later this year. I wrote every one of those reviews with the intention of sharing them. I do that with my blog postings too.
I guess I don’t mind the thought of my comments on Amazon or on my blog being used that way, but I just don’t know or understand enough about Facebook to know what the purpose of the “social networking site” is about.
It is one thing to like some product or service and to tell people about that. It’s another thing for one’s opinion to be repackaged as an ad for that product or service without permission. I consider the content of my blog to be fair game for sharing in whole or in part and even shared and changed. No problem – for any non-commercial and non-nefarious purposes. If I want my words, images or ideas to be used to shill for some company, I’ll make that arrangement, thank you very much. I won’t have that arrangement made for me by virtue of holding an account at a social networking site.
Your blog looks fine to me. I am viewing it with Safari, what are you using? (I know that mine sometimes looks weird through Firefox or Explorer)
How curious. Everything seems fine now. I use Firefox mostly. Something strange happened yesterday. Maybe I was abducted by aliens?
I see no funny symbols at all. Has this just started happening (you seeing funny symbols) since Mr. Ford became mayor?
It could well be Rob Ford’s fault. It started happening last night, and looks fine on a different computer. Very curious.