Really tired of these people, actually.

Just got the second call within two weeks from the Nielsen ratings folks. Now, this is really funny, because I don't watch TV at all. And Scott barely watches, usually when he is over at friends' places and it is on. I'm sure there are shows I might like, but mostly I don't like TV and movies and they take too much time for what they are.

Yet these people still, after being told that, want to send me a little booklet and have me fill it out. Both times I have told them that I watch no TV and don't actually care about their ratings in the least. If they would like to fill out a booklet with "none" for me that is fine by me, but I don't want to be sent one.

Why, after I said that the first time, did they call back? And why are they so deathly hard to get off your phone again? They keep trying to tell me that they value all input, even "no tv watched". They may. I don't value what they do, so I don't want to. And I'd like them to stop wasting my time with phone calls. Once is one thing, but to have them call back again with the same script is frustrating.

LJ and sponsored accounts

LJ is adding (has added) corporate sponsored "communities" (I'm sorry, a corporate ad-blog isn't really a community, even if they structure it as one, not exactly - but that is the code base it's using, anyway). And will be adding sponsored features also. They chose to post about it in lj_biz rather than in any of the more common places (such as news), but they're still doing it (have done: the first such community exists).

Yeah, along with the Plus accounts, this goes well with the 'no ads! EVAR!' promise they used to have up. Anyway, it's created a fair furor. I don't care for the action at all; I wanted to let anyone reading who wasn't aware of this, know; feel free to ignore the info if you don't care (or go check out the new sponsored community, if you want).

Posts up so far are the first one and the damage control that doesn't seem to have quite worked. I've linked to the comment-on page so you can decide whether to be bombarded with comments - as I type this up, the first has more than 2400 comments, the second more than 500.

The FAQ for this is here, and isn't it interesting that they just told us about these when the FAQ currently shows a Last Updated value of "September 8th, 2006 (burr86)"? They just neatly slid it into the available links when they were ready.