Giving Something Back

I had a thought recently, which is a good thing because I was wondering if I was ever going to have one in 2010. I am really enjoying writing these posts and from the unsolicited feedback people have been giving me, you seem to also be enjoying reading it. While I don’t check the stats all that often (only every five seconds or so), the last time I checked, the blog has had over 650 hits since it started, from places including the Slovenia, Ireland, Italy, Poland, the US on devices from the usual IE and Firefox to iphones and ipads. I am also hopefully about to have an article published in a quarterly Jesuit magazine which has a reference back to this blog so readership should increase even more.

Anyway, I digress. The thought was that WE could use this blog to help the people here. Blogger is owned by google and so I can allow google to place ads on this blog. Now I have been using gmail for many years and I have never as far as I can remember, clicked on an ad which are always present on the right hand side of the page. The only times I have clicked on an ad is to help a web site that I have gotten something useful from, like a computer program. I dislike advertising in general and so decided up front to not enable ads. But that was because I didn’t want to make money for myself out of it.

So here is my plan/suggestion. I am going to do a trial run of one month with ads enabled at the side of the blog. I’m currently posting about once every seven to ten days. I would like to think most of the posts are entertaining (dare I even say amusing). If you think so too, then I ask you to click on the top ad after reading a post. As far as I know all you have to do is click it and then you can close the window. The fact that the webpage didn’t fully load is irrelevant apparently. For a change, I’m not asking you for money, but instead, about 5 seconds of your life for each new post. At the end of the trial I will post the results and if we actually make some decent money (lets say $10-$20) then I will continue and at the end of next year I will post a survey and WE can decide what to do with the money. Every penny/cent/kwatcha will go to community. Perhaps we can help an orphan get an education, help a HIV+ family earn an income by buying some goats or provide a borehole so that a community can get fresh water. I don’t know, but I’ll get some options and post them. If you hate the idea then hopefully you can just ignore the ads, just as I do in gmail.