Content freedom or freedom from content? Maybe they’re related.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
I’ve been wrestling with my conscience. The point of debate: should I stimulate a little disposable income by hosting some form of advertising?
On the one hand, my bandwidth isn’t metered, I never get caught with extra large cable bills because of my hobby. On the other hand, I loathe the unreliable box this site runs on with its cantankerous memory problem that prevents me from building a properly configured kernel.
On the one hand, I’m not a very good capitalist, I’d just as soon give things away as sell them. On the other, the adverts are unobtrusive and might actually be helpful to someone.
On the one hand, it seems sorta tacky. On the other hand, lots of folks are doing it and I don’t hold it against them. (Well, except were it botches the layout so badly that I can hardly read it. But I think I could avoid that problem.)
On the one hand, well, I’ve run out of hands really.
So, while I wrestled, I thought I’d at least get an account setup with Google AdSense since that seems to be the accepted choice. If I decided not to go through with it, no harm done, I figured.
I figured wrong. No, really, what I figured didn’t matter. They turned me down. I guess I’m content free. At least, I know I don’t rate with Google.
I do sometimes like to imagine that the things I say have merit and I’m not sure I can say with total honesty that my ego is unbruised, but it’s made of pretty tough stuff. You work on technical committees with your peers for a while, you’ll understand.
Update 12 May 2004
Google changed their minds. I do rate after all.
Comments:
My. What a stunning lack of sense on Google's part.
When I applied for AdSense, I had to 'appeal' because they first rejected me. I think there's some badly working automated component to the screening.