Gone too soon...

You see, I was going to write something flippant and vaguely humorous about this story.

The story of how the owner of a rememberance web site where people could host commemorative pages on friends and loved ones when they have died, had introduced Google Ads in an attempt to fund his voluntary site which has grown to a proportion never envisaged by him when he set it up.

The problem with Google Ads is that it looks for key words on each page and then places advertisements on there appropriate to those words.

Appropriate to those words maybe, but not necessarily appropriate to the deceased person on that page - so a victim of a motorbike accident found themselves hosting and advert for motorbikes and the page for Soham murder victims had a self defence class advert placed on it, bad taste even for my taste.

Still, it did bring to mind the story of the tree that we wanted to be placed in the garden of rest where my dad's ashes lay, the plaque to read "how much was this then", his favourite saying.

But then I visited www.gonetoosoon.co.uk and the first page I read was for a 15 year old girl that by complete coincidence looks vaguely like my 15 year old girl, except this young lady has recently died very near to where we live, her friends at school have entered tributes on her page and it hurts to read them, it hurts very much.

So I'll leave it there then, another fine example of how to use the internet and a fine effort by the person who started and now funds the whole thing, not his finest hour when he decided to use Google Ads but you shouldn't condemn otherwise.

Its 4pm, I need the pub and some lager to get rid of this lump in my throat.