Text ads can be smart, funny, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious when they show up in the wrong context.

David, our web designer and marketing maestro here at Pingdom was surfing the web last night and put together a list of really funny and original text ads from Google Adwords. We liked them so much that we made this blog entry for your perusal. Let yourself be inspired, or if you’re not into search engine marketing, at least amused.

Not quite as intended

Contextual text ads showing up in the wrong context can be highly amusing. Travel plans to Hell, anyone?

More examples over at ROI Revolution.

Clashing interests

This one started as a joke but got the attention of Apple’s lawyers. They are very protective of their brand and forced the person behind it to remove this.

ASCII art

Great idea, and very suitable for a digital design agency. (It would have looked better in a mono-space font, though.)

And here is an example of completely changing a rental car company’s approach to text ads. The pay-off? A 47% increase in click-through.

The potentially bad part about using ASCII art in your text ads is that Google seems to be actively filtering and removing ads with ASCII art.

Extremely well targeted

When Google shares plummeted early in 2006, the following, very well-targeted ad showed up. Talk about grabbing an opportunity.

Trading words

When Jeff Gerstmann was fired from his job as editorial director at GameSpot, the event got a lot of media attention. PC Gamer capitalized on this, and gaming blog GameBump retaliated. Via Adwords.

We’re sure there are plenty of other excellent examples of text ads out there. If you have links to good ones, please do share them in comments.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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