Should I Join the Dark Side of the Force?

Today I received an offer to blog for pay, the secret dream of many bloggers with moderate or low income like myself.

Unfortunately for my ego, I wasn't chosen based upon merit. I had answered a call for bloggers posted on Craigslist. "Want to get paid for writing?" the ad copy said.

Quite tempting, you know.

I received an email today with additional information and a non-disclosure agreement, in .PDF format, that states in legalese that I must keep mum about all the shady things I will be paid to do.

I am faced with an ethical dilemma. Do I really want to be paid to lie?

The company boasts of being a "reputation management firm for the Internet" with the goal of "neutralizing bad publicity" by so-called "liars and cranks" in the blogosphere.

I happen to think much of that bad publicity is well-deserved.

Dear Mr. Business Criminal, if you do not want someone to write something bad about you, then don't harm people. Don't mislead. Don't lie, cheat or steal. Simple, huh? Know what this is called? Ethics. Try it some day. You might like it. You might even find that people like you because you're ethical.

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I spent much of my life designing technological solutions for people. It saddens me to see technology misused for lies and distortion, as if we weren't already deluged with deceptive propaganda from radio, TV, books, newspapers and magazines.

The Internet was supposed to be an anarchic realm where average Joes could speak their piece and even--wonder of wonders--be heard from time to time. Instead of accepting this new paradigm, the business community is up in arms against it and taking steps to shut people up and clamp down upon this dangerous free speech. Business owners enlist lawyers and Internet reputation management firms to shut the little guy up.

So much for freedom of speech, eh? It was a good idea while it lasted, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and the rest of you elegant aristocrats.

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For about five minutes, I really considered doing it, which in retrospect is embarrassing. Yeah, I could use the cashola. No lie. To date, my ad revenue has amounted to $1.10, which translates into about two cents per blog entry. Is that union scale? Somehow I doubt it.

In the end, though, I found out something about myself. I'd rather die than lie.

I don't want to be another one of these well-paid liars I read all across the Internet and the mainstream media.

Sorry, Darth. I just can't join the Dark Side of the Force. Sorry. I'd rather die.

If life means anything, anything at all, then ethics has to play a role. There has to be a higher purpose to this existence. If truth doesn't matter, and money is the only goal, then we are all better off dead. Let's clear off and let another species evolve intelligence on this planet.

Why Did I Put Ads on my Blog?

The short answer--this blog is an experiment and a learning experience for me. Online advertising is a new development over the past decade. I wanted to experience it from the perspective of the content provider. That's what I am--a content provider. Wow.

Do I provide any content that people want? Questionable. In reality, my blog receives less than five visits per day. Certainly not enough to turn any profit via advertising. In fact, after 617 visits, I have earned exactly zero dollars and zero cents. Why, then, should I trouble myself with ads?

There are certain aspects I like about the ads. For one thing, they are inoffensive, not at all like the "Smash a Monkey Game" that occupied ad banners years ago. If I saw stupid ads like that, I would discontinue the service. Ads seem to give my site a more professional look, as though I'm already successful and commercial, although I'm far from it.

Ads give me subtle feedback on my content. If I see ads for conservative web sites, then I know I've been using words like "conservative" and "Republican" often. I like to guess at the reasoning that the AdSense robot employed to match my site with certain kinds of ads. I also have a suspicion that advertising may increase my ranking on the search engines, although this has not been the case so far.

I relish the stark contrast between my content and the horse crap offered by online advertising. Whereas I make the assumption that my reader is intelligent and educated, advertisers assume the opposite. I use whatever skills I may have in logic and writing. Advertisers rely upon slogans, and--on ads with graphical images--the faces of attractive models. They are appealing to the lower level of the human consciousness, while I am appealing to the higher, I would expect.

Mainly, I'm simply curious about advertising and how it works. At some point, I may tire of hosting ads for free and discontinue the service. If I receive any feedback from people who dislike the ads, then I would be inclined to act sooner.

I only get paid when, and if, people actually click on an ad, and no one in their right mind ever clicks on an internet ad. The only people who might click on an ad would be people new to the Internet who do not understand the ways of the beast. This is why many people, after installing the Firefox browser, add the "Adblock Plus" add-on in order to filter out all of the advertising from the internet. Does this deprive hard-working content providers of income? Not really, because elite users do not click on ads to begin with. Only clueless novices do, for the most part. Yet I have read tirades against Adblock Plus by webmasters who think it will evaporate their precious income.

Who is making money from online advertising? Mainly, people running scams, whereby their associates click on the ads on purpose. This is the main group. The other group consists of people running extremely popular sites that receive tens of thousands of hits per day. I suppose that there is a chance you might somehow click an ad by accident, not meaning to, and this will result in income accruing to the cunning webmaster. There may actually be some users in the world that may click on an ad because they want to.

I don't feel the payment schedule for advertising is very fair to content providers, because if an ad appears at all, it has some influence upon the end user. Brand familiarity is established. Expecting a user to click on an ad to learn more is asking quite a lot. Content providers should be paid by the impression, instead of by the click-thru-rate, which rewards those who market their sites to novices, such as children, who I would expect to click on more ads than adults, especially if they see their favorite cartoon character or television actor.

Does this help to explain why you see ads on a left-wing political blog? I'm not against capitalism, by the way, although I am against laissez-faire. There is only one entity that can stand up to a multi-billion dollar corporation, and that's the federal government. State and local governments can be easily bought or bullied.

What if the Blog is Better than the Book?

Last year, I rediscovered a fantasy author from way back when, Piers Anthony, who wrote the bestseller, "A Spell for Chameleon." As a boy, I read him avidly. In the strictest sense of the word, Piers does not keep a blog, which I define as a place where people may reply with comments, but rather a web site. You cannot post comments to his entries, but you can email him, and he is one of the few celebrity authors in the world still willing to respond even to a stupid message.

He posts a bimonthly opinion piece filled with notes and observations, often concerning his own life but also about politics. I will not comment upon his opinions, although my enthusiastic endorsement probably says quite enough. I'm crazy about his web site! I liked it so much, I decided to start reading Piers again, even though I'm not a big fan of fantasy anymore in my decrepit dotage. Based upon no logic at all, I began at random with a book that I purchased from Ebay, because it cost less than five dollars and I'm a big fat cheapskate.

My selection was the first book in the Tarot series. Talk about disappointment! Dull, dull, dull. I could hardly tell that the same man had written both the book and the web site. At any rate, there's no question for me but that the web site is head and shoulders above the book. This perplexes me, because a web site is supposed to be more spontaneous and to lack the beneficial oversight of an editor or proofreader. All that I can conclude is that Piers may be better at writing about real things than about fantasy. Probably I should give him another chance in the book department, especially with one of his newer creations. Maybe when "Tarot" came out, he was going through a slump of some kind. For my money, Anne Rice has not written a good book since "Memnoch," a turkey which marked the end of her good material. I liked her early vampire, witch and mummy books, and am not sure what happened to her brain to silence the muse.

Piers Anthony also maintains a useful section reviewing a long list of publishers, both print and online, that are willing to work with lesser known authors. If you want to publish your own work, you should definitely visit the site of Piers Anthony, because he has become an indisputable expert in the field. In the past, he has battled various publishers that sought to take advantage of him. When one writer is willing to stand up for his rights and not be trampled over, this helps all writers.

I would like to receive suggestions as to which read PA book to try next, other than the "Xanth" series, which I have already read long ago. I would like to try new material.