Taco Beach, CA. Have I mentioned that I’m the only one in my family with a blog or active presence on the web? Siblings and mom are all email-literate, and older sister, Kats, is big on the forwarded sentimental messages, but I’m the only one with the blogs and myspace and facebook. With the Florida move on the near horizon I bought the siblings Flickr “pro” accounts, hoping that that would encourage them to share more stuff on the web. But when I was showing one of my sisters how to get to Flickr my brother-in-law saw one of my blogs and said, “ew, ads on your website,’ mistakenly assuming that I was using a free-service that required I carry advertising. Before I had a chance to explain anything said brother-in-law was totally turned off. Damn. That might explain why I have to earn a damn cent from Amazon, Google, GelaSkins or any other vendor I’ve pimped.**

I think even the highly self-promoting entrepreneurial Chris Pirillo dropped ads from his sites at one point. Now he has a small banner and another tiny ad tucked in his chat stream. Of course what it really comes down to is that someone like Pirillo probably has easily several thousand unique visitors monthly and easily 10,000 devoted followers that make his sites profitable. I know that there are widgets that can give me my blogs metrics, but I’d rather not know that my following consists of one or two ex-girl-friends and whoever else might stumble in my direction.So, I started this this entry wanting to explain why I have Google ads or iTunes or Amazon picks, in part hoping to get more clicks once my faithful relatives… er… readers realized that their clicks would help me directly. I hate to say it, but it all comes down to being a part of a community (said the perpetual rogue who will soon be leaving for the other end of the continent… ). As I work through this I’m now thinking that I just need to promote the blog(s) more and not get all caught up in the graphic design/ad placement thing. One meaningful link with tons of web traffic is way better than a wall of flashing gifs in an empty parking lot. 🙂

Oh yeah, all of this will have to wait until I have time to update my blog software and layout (which is #17 on the list of things I need to do). jbb

**(Add to that I just got dissed at Taco Beach, off-duty, and drunk cutie Jamie came up to me, assuming that I was blogging about the scene and said that I needed to write that “Jamie says to fuck off.’ Nice… and here I thought that she was a happy drunk. Why does her negative comment out weigh the four positive comments I’ve gotten for my OLPC tonight?)

Related Twitters:

• corrections to yearbook pages sent 2 vendor. Job#1 done 4 today. Income tax info & grades next on deck… but 1st early dinner @ taco beach #
• Another Friday night, another voyeristic night @ taco beach; punk band is deafeningly loud, even halfway 2 the door. sensory overload #
• too much smoke coming in from the street, ate way too much, just being the geek boy with the dorky green OLPC drinking Heff & yawning #

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Music/Podcast: Diggnation – Diggnation Live in Amsterdam from the album “Diggnation (Small Quicktime)” by Revision3