Category Archives: Online Life

An AdSense Experiment

Online Life, The ChangeLog

Dan was telling me a month or two ago that he’s using Google AdSense on his blog. Now that I’m actually doing this regularly, I figured I’d try it out, and while I’m at it, on a few parts of my other sites.

I’m highly curious what sort of ads it will dish up. There isn’t exactly a massive market for products related to developing Russian languages patches for FreeCiv, for instance. Initial results are not all that positive, but we’ll see. It may be a very short-lived experiment :-)

This is presently deployed here on The ChangeLog, on the directory indices on the HTML-to-Gopher gateway on quux.org, and the message pages of the list archives on lists.complete.org.

On the monetary side, running all this costs me about $600 per year. While I would be quite surprised if AdSense brings in that much, maybe it would at least bring in enough to pay for some more disk space for the Gopher server…

I’ll keep you updated.

Community Doesn’t Generate Income?

Online Life

I came across this article in PC World about the rising usage of Usenet. The story talks about reasons for this, and has this quote from Forrester Research: “Community just doesn’t generate much income.”

There is where I disagree. The Internet itself developed as a new tool for communication — for building communities, and helping those communities function (yes, even when it was ARPANet). And everwhere you look people are building communities online: Usenet is one prime example, but I can also site the proliferation of IM/IRC systems, web forums, communities surrounding prominent sites such as EBay, the entire Weblog phenomenon, and several others.

To Forrester I say: Check out this new thing called “The Internet.” You might find a whole new world — er, community — out there.

Online Collaboration Shapes Politics

Online Life, Politics

David Weinberger has an interesting article about the blog for Presidential candidate Howard Dean. Apparently, “Dean’s campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability than the single mind of any political advisor.” David goes on to say “they’re viewing the Internet not as a cheap way to reach the masses but as a way to let us talk together.”

New way to find a job: Blogs

Online Life

It looks like my former employer, Quovix (a great place to work, BTW) decided that they’d try something new and look for applicants by posting a blog entry.

I think the idea is great, especially if the people that read your blog are the same group that you want to hire. Of course, this might not be for everyone — I can imagine whole sectors out there that don’t have people that tend to be into blogging — or even Web surfing, for that matter.

A Fresh Look at the ‘Net Tax

Online Life, Uncategorized

Recently, many U.S. states and large bricks-and-mortar retailers are again pushing the “Internet tax” — an effort to add sales tax to online purchases. This gets debated every few years, it seems, and we see similar arguments each time.

What the sates and existing retailers miss is that the sales tax is really a local tax. If I live in Lafayette, Ind. and drive to Chicago, IL for a day of shopping, I’d pay Chicago’s sales tax. And that is only right. After all, I’m contributing to the wear of Chicago’s roads, I’m benefiting from the police officers keeping the area safe, I could benefit from the fire dept. if there was a problem, and their snow crews let me travel around.

But if I sit at home and place the order, I’m doing none of those things. Without stepping foot in Chicago, I don’t benefit from their roadways or safe streets. The people that do — perhaps UPS, which delivers my package — already pay local taxes (fuel, sales, etc.) and that cost is passed along to me as part of the shipping fee.