Year: 2007

AdBrite’s Full Page Ads

Just when you thought the current crop of “I make money blogging” bloggers couldn’t get any more annoying, here’s even more fuel to the fire:

Ad network AdBrite announced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you’ve no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers’ time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site.

More power to the “I make money blogging and so can you!” crowd out there, but I just don’t see why you’d want to pollute your space of creativity and expression with ads that are probably not going to make you much (if any) money anyway. Sure, a few ads here and there are fine, but interrupting your readers attention and experience by throwing up a full page ad before they can visit your site or splicing AdSense units into your post just seems pathetic to me.

For bloggers with less than a million page views per month, the trade off just doesn’t seem worth it since all you’re doing is propping up the ad networks by participating in these schemes.

AdBrite: Full Page “Skip This Ad” Units Now Available for Everyone

Jewish and Early Christian Art


One of my main passions offline is research into Dura Europos. I had the privilege to catalogue, photograph and work with much of what remains of Dura Europos’ artwork while a grad student at Yale (Yale led the Dura Europos excavations in the 1930’s and brought thousands and thousands of pieces back to the Yale Art Gallery where much of it resides in the basement of the Gallery now).

I’ve always been intrigued by the Synagogue at Dura Europos. It’s an amazing and even puzzling place for westerners who like to assume that Jewish communities have always followed the non-graven images rule strictly in their worship spaces since Sinai. However, the Dura Europos Synagogue is filled with artwork, both biblical and pagan in nature, and shows a complex artistic tradition that extended beyond the Syrian desert where Dura Europos is located.

Here’s a well thought out (and researched) post expanding that idea entitled “The Protestant Revision of History” from the Turretin Debate Blog (Turretin was a Reformed theologian who was especially influential in Calvinist and Puritan circles… evidently this blog should be read through those lens):

Neither were later Jews against images and veneration. The ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos, which was destroyed in the mid 200s AD is filled with icons and imagery. And ancient house churches from the same period were also found containing icons. As the Christians inherited Jewish worship practices, they must have been guided in interpretation of Exodus 20:4 by the Jewish practices, which clearly were not iconoclastic. No wonder Orthodox churches are covered in images, since the Jewish synagogues were the same. And yet there is no condemnation of the Jews by Christians over this issue…Protestants think to themselves that the early church must have been
primitive and basic, with no relationship to the ornate and colourful
world of Orthodoxy with its churches and vestments. But the facts and
archeology say differently. Ancient Jewish and Christian worship is
characterised by the ornate, by images, icons and symbolism. The
ancient Christian catacombs contain icons, including those of Mary
holding the Christ child as would be familiar to any Orthodox
Christian. (Ouspensky, Leonid, Theology of the Icon, Vol 1, Crestwood,
NY (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), c1978, pp. 74-75).

Fun stuff to ponder on a beautiful Monday afternoon!

Callwave

I use a service called “Callwave” to handle my voicemail. Basically, it turns incoming voicemail into txt messages so I don’t have to listen to every message.

Or that’s what it’s supposed to do. Looks like the service has been down all morning and I can’t login to my account via the website to even check on things or cancel my account. I’ve spoken to a couple of other Callwave users who are seeing the same thing on their accounts.

They’ve got a blog but haven’t updated it with any issues today. Ugh.

Looks like I’m declaring voicemail bankruptcy! The joys of being an early adopter…

Callwave

Narcissus Called… He Wants His Blogosphere Back

Everyone loves fame (except for the wise ones), so it’s no surprise that there’s been an over abundance of “popular” lists and rankings emerging from all areas of the blogosphere lately.

The sad fact is that no one really cares.

Hot on the heels of the Techmeme Leaderboard, the newest offenders are Scoble and TechCrunch:

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments – with his permission weā€™ve published it below.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has the right idea:

Hereā€™s some honesty. I love seeing Marketing Pilgrim on any listā€“like many bloggersā€“and I suggested MP be added to this new list. Guilty, as charged. But then I stopped and asked, ā€œwhen will this blog-list insanity stop?ā€ Do we really need to keep compiling lists of top blogs?

The blogosphere is all about the ā€œlong tail.ā€ If we continue to highlight only the top 0.0001% blogs we do nothing but encourage the echo-chamber when instead we should be trying to delve deeper/wider into the blogosphere.

I’ve recently discovered a great trick to get past my disgust at such navel gazing… unsubscribing. Seriously, it works wonders to vote with your feet eyeballs attention and let the free market figure out when bloggers have spent too much time staring into the puddle of Narcissus.

There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers.

Doctorow and Le Guin in Spat Over Fair Use

Two of my favorite writers, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K Le Guin, are in a bit of a spat over the perception of fair use and creative commons in relation to a short Le Guin piece that Doctorow published on the uber popular boingboing.net blog:

In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that Michael Chabon “has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Le Guin’s paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.

In my own non-important view, I have to side with Doctorow here… he seemed to have nothing but the best of intentions and wanted to introduce a new crowd of readers from boingboing to Le Guin’s excellent work. Additionally, his explanation of Fair Use seems to be right on… but I’m not a copyright lawyer (thank the gods), so what do I know?

Yet again, here’s an instance of the offline and online publishing worlds having a difficult time grok-ing the intricacies of each others’ systems, customs and practices.

You say tomato, I say tomato… let’s call the whole thing off.

An apology to Ursula K Le Guin – Boing Boing

Colbert Opinion Piece in the NY Times

Stephen Colbert assumes the role of Maureen Dowd in today’s NY Times. Very very funny:

Surprised to see my byline here, arenā€™t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I donā€™t. So Iā€™ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(Iā€™d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, sheā€™s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldnā€™t have to think about. Itā€™s all George Bushā€™s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now Iā€™ve written Frank Richā€™s column too.

Great stuff… go read the whole thing.

Pictures and Videos

I’ve had a couple of people email me to find out where the videos and pics of Mary Hudson, etc are located on the web.

Pictures: http://photos.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my Flickr site which is the same thing).

Videos: http://tv.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my YouTube site which is the same thing).

There’s a constant stream of pics and videos flowing these days since Mary Hudson is having a lot of “firsts!” so be sure to check in or subscribe to those places if you’re into feed reading.

BTW, I’m also a heavy Twitter user. If you’re a user add me (http://www.twitter.com/samharrelson) or sign up and give it a go. It’s good for your constitution.

Affiliate Marketers Can’t Decide Who or What Affiliate Marketers Actually Are

What does this say about the affiliate marketing industry when leading “affiliates” …er… publishers can’t decide on a proper definition for themselves.  Let’s debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin next:

28 Comments

Affiliates Grow Up and Exit

Blogged with Flock