A month ago a friend of mine wrote a blog titled The real Killroys. In it she outlined how social media sites are, essentially, the nightmarish big brother we once read about. Basically, if you put a Facebook button on your site, whenever someone views your site, Facebook knows jee was there. In other words, Facebook has a dossier on every one of its users. And it doesn't matter if you log out of Facebook, you're still tracked. The same goes for Tumblr, Google, Digg, and all the others (but man, especially Google Analytics.) She noted that site owners either didn't know or didn't care that this was going on.

I also recall that Chris Guillebeau once wrote something about how when a website visitor sees ads on the site, jee naturally assumes that the site owner endorses (if not at least vets) the quality of the products advertised. I have been using Google Adsense which theoretically produced a few pennies of revenue, but I never got any control [well, technically, a little control] over what ads were placed.

And then there was the speed issue. I would often notice that although stuff from JayceLand.com would load quick, if the page stalled, it would be "Waiting for" digg.com, or google-analytics.com, or ecx.images-amazon.com, or pagead2.googlesyndication.com, or googleads.g.doubleclick.net — but almost never JayceLand.com.

So I stripped all that stuff off. I left the Weather Underground image. I know they also track, but at least it's something directly useful. So now it loads fast.