andydidyk.com

A few days ago, I added Google Adsense advertisting to what I hope is an unobtrusive are inoffensive area of my site.  I was curious – could I make any real money by blogging?  Would the ads be relevant to my readers?  Would anyone care?

These questions put me face-to-face with the ethical dilemma I’ve been having as of late: is it unethical to block ads?

Like over 47% of the online community (as of April 2009), I use Firefox as my default web browser.   And like over 50 million other people, I use Adblock Plus and a set of filters to block out 99% of the advertisements on sites I visit.

It started out innocently enough: many years ago, I was surfing the web on a 56K modem and the ads were simply eating up too much bandwidth (especially on sites like weather.com and cnn.com, where the ads are numerous and the actual content is slim), so I installed AdBlock with Firefox, and POOF all the ads were history.

Fast forward to 2009, where broadband penetration is north of 25% for the US, and I suspect that number to be tripled or higher for content creators.  So bandwith isn’t a big deal.  True, the ads are mostly annoyances, but the ad revenue is at least theoretically what compensates the producers of content and frees those people from having to hold down another job just to put good stuff online.

So here’s the moral contract I’ve made with myself.  For blogs, news sites, Hulu, and other services that I use regularly and derive value from, I will selectively disable Adblock Plus for the entire site.  It’s the way capitalism and American consumerism works at its best – voting with our (or really the advertiser’s) money as to what content is valuable and useful to the individual.  This costs me nothing, but I believe that it will make me a better citizen of the internet.

Conversely, I will selectively block individual ads that I find to be offensive, overly obtrusive, or stupid.  Yes, that’s highly subjective, but so am I when I’m choosing what to read or consume.

As with yesterday’s example, I shouldn’t expect something for nothing.  What do you think?

Let me start out by saying that I love being a “vendor” working for a “client” 99% of the time (a good vendor is usually called a “partner”).  If you are a good match for your client, you get to do great work, shake things up a bit, and everyone, vendor included, will see valuable returns on their investments.

But being on the agency side, you also get exposed to the occasional bad apple, the type that wants you to itemize every dollar spent on an inexpensive  project and then spend a half-day meeting nitpicking every detail to see if any individual item could be “done cheaper” (and yes, that was a very painful, personal experience).

Selling services is always a tough gig, because no matter what your industry you’re always selling ideas and time, rather than widgets.  At an interactive agency, the great ideas and time produce a deliverable, but if you are in the business of selling “websites” rather than creative, engaging experiences, your product is very easy to commoditize.

But I digress.  What I love about this video is that it pokes fun at what the bad (or let’s just say inexperienced?) client is prone to do – try to get something for nothing, or try to devalue the service after it’s rendered.  True negotiation, on the other hand, is an everyday part of doing business.

A colleague of mine forwarded a great article to me called “Beware the Social Media Charlatans” by Robert Strohmeyer at PC World.  In it, Strohmeyer cautions against spending resources on the burgeoning social media consultants popping up all over the country.  The problem, as he sees it:

Combine a rapidly growing trend of social media adoption with an economy that has forced hundreds of thousands of workers to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for consultant overload.  Since nobody seems to know what the hell’s going on with Twitter anyway, nearly anyone can pass themselves off as an expert on the subject. So suddenly all those poseurs who might otherwise have bilked the hapless with offers of life coaching services or Feng Shui consulting have jumped on the social networking bandwagon. You can hardly swing a stick on the sidewalk nowadays without smacking one of these guys in the head.

While I haven’t personally been in a position to hire a social media consultant, I am ocassionally annoyed by the risible amount of self-promotion through social media channels these folks seem to require to keep their businesses going.  And I’m sure that if my livlihood depended on teaching businesses how to Twitter, I’d be pretty miffed about Mr. Strohmeyer’s article.  But then again, the term “consultant” has always been a loaded one, and I’m sure that most consultants have already come to grips with that in their own businesses.

The truth is, even at our agency, which is filled with a lot of very smart and creative people, social media has yet to be proven the panacea and/or the gold mine that a lot of marketers want you to believe.  It’s an important component to consider for some businesses and certainly valuable for individuals who want to take control of what the Internet is saying about them, but the metrics just aren’t there to support some of the radical positions I’ve heard at conferences and in the blogosphere.

But here’s my favorite part of the article:

The truth is that there are almost no rules in social networking that don’t already apply in just about any other social environment. A great many smart people have already written worthy perspectives on how to be a good citizen on Facebook and Twitter, and I hardly need to reiterate here what amounts to general common sense. Just as in life, the only rule that really matters is the Golden Rule. All the rest is either derivative, or flat-out nonsense, and you really shouldn’t be paying big bucks for either. [emphasis mine]

This is true.  Think about it.  Let’s say you went to a party where 10% of the people you knew intimately, 20% were best friends, colleagues, etc., and the remaining 70% were acquaintances, important people from another time in your life that you didn’t keep up with that often, and some people that you admire from afar as potential business connections.  I’d say that probably approximates the Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles of many.  During that party, which let’s just say lasts an entire day, you update everyone you can about the fact that you’re speaking at a conference.  That’s normal, and good, right?  But here’s the thing – you probably wouldn’t tell everyone things like, “I just woke up,” or, “THESE ARE MY FIVE FAVORITE THINGS”, or “according to a survey I took, I am most like the Sex in the City character Gandalf the Orange” multiple times.

And you certainly wouldn’t want one of the people at that party to be a smooth-talking salesman for a company who’s product you might use but you don’t care much about, like soap, or paper, or maybe even an interactive agency or social media consultant!  If they had something valuable to say that was directly beneficial to you or interesting, that’s one thing, but you’d never invite a broadcaster of unwanted content to your party, at least not on purpose.  Your time is limited, and you don’t appreciate it being wasted.

Facebook recently included a “Hide” feature for removing status updates from those people that you want to stay “friends” with but are sick of hearing from.  I don’t know about you, but I welcomed the opportunity to shut out some of the noise so that I could spend my time keeping up with people who were interested in having an actual conversation.

A social media strategy for a company, or for an individual, requires the thoughtful guidance of someone who is skilled at building relationships.  And I like Robert Strohmeyer’s advice – the first rule to think about is the Golden one.

I’ve been MIA lately, and with what is clearly becoming a pattern of very poor netiquette, I neglected to tell anyone.

The truth is, I’ve been switching hosting providers, and I’ve also been converting our family blog from a Blogger format to Wordpress.  Let me tell you, neither process has been easy, painless, or fun.  But at least it’s finished (mostly).

I’ll offer this to anyone considering using Wordpress to power their blog – it’s by far the most versatile, expandable, and customizable platform available.   And, it’s free.  However, you’d better be prepared to get your hands dirty in the code once you start wanting it to do some very specific things – like be able to handle extremely large image uploads.

And please, save yourself some frustration and do your homework when it comes to choosing a shared hosting provider.  I had been using 1and1 hosting, chiefly because they seemed to offer the most for your money and they advertise very heavily in trade publications.   However, if you ever intend to have any appreciable degree of traffic on your site, or plan on uploading or manipulating large files or images (think over 2MB), it’s a terrible choice.  1and1 has draconian server limitations for their shared hosting accounts, such as not being able to use a server process that requires more than 16MB of RAM.  I didn’t care about this until I selected a Wordpress template for my family blog that I wanted to upload images to that were 8 megapixels (about 5MB) in size – then Wordpress just crashed and burned.  Not to mention the fact that a ton of Wordpress features simply don’t work within the 1and1 hosting environment.

I can highly recommend (and indeed, so does Wordpress) bluehost.com for all of your shared hosting needs.  They don’t have dedicated hosting options, so if you end up with a massive spike in traffic you’ll have to change hosting providers, but their service is outstanding (phone calls answered by a real person, live chat sessions started within a minute of clicking on the button, etc.), and they only run about $7 a month.  I’ve been very happy so far.

So enough complaining.   I’ve successfully moved both blogs and have learned a ton in the process.  Now  I just need to figure out how to get rid of the strange characters that got inserted everywhere on this blog after the move.  And then back to posting more content.  The funny thing about bad netiquitte is that when you stop posting, it’s not like people complain or anything.  They simply stop visiting your site and they vote with thier visits.  The good thing is that you can easily resurrect your site with fresh content at any time, and the rewards of writing are worthy of my time even without substantial traffic.  Thanks everyone for reading!

UPDATE:

Success!  This is why I love Wordpress.  The problem I had in moving my database is that everytime I had a double space on this blog, it somehow converted the double space to this character – Â.  After a painless search and installation of a simple plugin (aptly named Search and Replace), I was able to replace all 516 instances of  with the double space.  Everything was fixed in less than two minutes.  Sweet!  That’s a lot better than waiting for a tech support email from Google (owner of Blogger) to solve a similar problem I had a while back.