I have had advertising on my blog for as long as I can remember. Except for the period of time when I hosted the site at Wordpress.com, I have always had AdSense, Chitika, or some other ad services content being contextually presented to my visitors.

Frankly, I found having ads up on my site extremely hypocritical, as I do everything in my power to avoid seeing ads of any kind during my day-to-day Web use. My browsers have ad-blocking plugins, or pass through ad-blocking proxies to eliminate the content I see as intrusive and unwanted.

Still, I spent a long time thinking about ad-placement on my own blog, and what I could do to drive traffic to get revenue, from something I didn’t believe in myself.

Yes, my blog doesn’t get huge amounts of traffic. And yes, I have been paid out exactly four times by AdSense in the 5 years I have been blogging. In four years, I have made $400 from the ads on my site.

I find ads intrusive, invasive, repulsive, and, in many cases, extremely ugly. So why should visitors to my site have to suffer with them?

Effective Sunday, August 9 2009, the ad code, in all its various forms, has been eliminated from my site. My blog is now officially ad-free. And it will stay that way.

For me, ad-revenue is ineffective. It takes away from the true reason I started writing this blog: I have something to say. If I am always thinking “How will this play with the contextual ad providers?”, then I am not writing in my own voice. I am writing to meet the criteria of an algorithm that triggers on certain words and will provide advertising that might make me money.

By presenting ads to visitors, the same ads that I despise.

When you step back and think about your blog, consider the following.

• Do you think about every word in your posts, considering its effect on your SEO?
• Do you change your site design often to try and discover the optimal ad layout?
• Is ad revenue more important than your reputation as a blogger?
• Do you always think about branding in terms of dollars instead of in terms of authority and reputation?

Blogging is not about the money. And while I read Darren Rowse and other pro-blogging advocates, I also realize that they’re focus is on quality content for an appreciative audience.

I feel that ad revenues can lead to the loss of your blogging voice. And my voice and reputation are what are most vital to me, not dollars from ugly ads.

Budgets are shrinking. Resources are tight or shrinking. In a recent post, I discussed how ideas that I had been a proponent of for 2-3 years suddenly became extremely valuable to companies during the downturn of 2001-2003.

This downturn is a different beast. This means that you will need more than basic technical smarts to get through. To survive in the world of e-commerce for the next 18 months, here are some strategies you should take to heart.

• Clean up the cruft. Development and infrastructure changes are going to slow during the downturn – accept this. So do a code audit. Make sure that your applications aren’t calling files that no longer exist. Get rid of (backup and archive or Sarbanes-Oxley will bite your butt) old directories or application code that is no longer supported or maintained. In other words, do your Spring cleaning.

• Take care of the annoyances. In the rush to get code out or fix issues, little things that could help your site are often overlooked. Take the time now to optimize your images, minify your JS files, ensure your CSS files only contain styles that you use. Tune your SQL queries. Optimize your app code. All those things that got lost in the rush to get stuff out the door. As Microsoft and Apple have realized, people want performance, not more features.

• Make your site Browser Neutral. I work for a firm that allows me to view various sites with different OS/browser combinations easily and recommend to clients that they do the same. I hang my head when I look at my own blog and realize that it is not Browser Neutral. Take some time to investigate to how to eliminate this frustrating annoyance that makes people cranky and doubt your technical savvy.

• Get to know your visitors/customers. Unlike a ‘real’ store, you can’t step out onto the floor and talk to customers. But you can do this far more easily in today’s world than ever before. In the past, visitor analytics would have been the extent to which a company would have gone to determine information about their visitors/customers. Today, Twitter, Facebook, and all other manner of social sites make listening and talking to customers much easier. Just remember to be real.

• Get to know the people you work with. Just like getting to know your visitors/customers, you need to spend some time getting to know people in your organization. I know this sounds like manager-speak, but if you have contacts in Finance, Product Management, Operations, Admin, you are more likely to be able to more effectively due your job. If you understand the ebb and flow and stresses that are going on outside your little enclosed silo, you can place things in a larger perspective. While social-networking may work here, be careful to back it up with face-to-face contact.

• Get to know people! I made a number of contacts in the last downturn by taking my key interests (Web compression, Web caching) and turning them into sites, published articles, and one failed conference appearance (contact me if you want to hear more). Over the years these contacts have had me comment on their posts, edit their books, and keep them up-to-date on where I think the latest trends are headed. Going into this downturn, I have a whole group of new contacts that I am building on to do the same things. People aren’t bad, they’re just misunderstood.

• Read the fine business plan. I know these things are evil. They are in horrible management-speak. So don’t read it that way: Active read it. Make notes in the columns. Turn it into a MindMap (that’s what I did this year). Extract the meaning of what the goals of the business are and how the Web site fits into it. If you understand what the rest of the business is doing and what their challenges are, your problems will have context!

• Know what the next big thing is. While the objective of the organization in a downturn is to try and be more efficient with fewer resources, remember that you have to take time (whatever you have left) to know what’s coming next that could affect your Web site. Read the tech news. Understand the fundamentals that are driving the latest ideas. Keep on top of security. Sometimes a side-project that uses a technology that is new can become a bigger part of your site when resources free up.

I know these are general, but when this downturn started, I looked back on what worked for me during the last downturn. These are a few of the things that got me through, kept me busy, and helped me make an impact on the company and industry I am in.

These things also don’t hurt your reputation, as you become known as someone who understands the industry, the business, and the customers.

Brand and Branding are tossed about as sterile concepts that people want to dissect on a repeated basis, as if a deeper understanding of the words themselves will allow a view into the soul of a people.

When I step back and examine these concepts, free of involvement in the world of Brand creation and propagandization, Branding and Brands degenerate to the most basic definition of the terms: the painful act of marking an object as something you own.

Viewed in this way, Branding is painful, permanent, and performed against the will of the object/being being inflicted with the Brand. It is a one-way act. A Brand is forced on a being/object, without any opportunity for a reciprocal act.

Corporate Branding is the same. Branding is not a conversation. As I have said previously (here), a Brand and the act of Branding is read-only, closed-source. The Brand is shaped and formed to uniquely identify its owner, and then it is placed with pride wherever the Brand-owner sees fit.

While a Brand is owned, and Branding marks those objects as belonging to the Brand owner, it is not a conversation. Reputation is a conversation. And conversations that occur about Brands seal their Reputations.

Wear your Brand. But then talk about it with others. You may find that the Brand is not what defines the company to the people who see it.

On a fine July day, a local man runs into a neighborhood bar carrying a stack of pamphlets, and wearing the hat announcing a new service. His beaming smile and easy attitude made the rest of the patrons want to listen to him.

“I have seen the greatest new thing in the history of our species,” he started. “A man in this very town has created a simple potion that, when taken once a month, allows your teeth to gleam, your farts to smell like rainbows, and gold coins to appear instantly from your fingertips!”

The crowd surged around him, listening to his spiel. They were spellbound, and chattered amongst themselves enthusiastically.

Then a local Man of Prestige entered the bar and listened for a few minutes. He shouted down the smiling pitchman and, with a sarcastic sneer on his face, said, “That’s Crazy Joe’s stuff isn’t it?”

The crowd stopped shouting and started murmuring.

“Crazy Joe has been tinkering in his garage for years,” the Man of Prestige started to say, not repressing his mirth. “One of his potions turned his dog into a three-legged, one-eyed rabbit with a rat-tail. His family has left him, and he is living on hand-outs.”

The Man of Prestige made his final point: “Why would you by something from a failure like Crazy Joe?”

The murmur had turned into a beehive buzz. Then someone shouted, “Look! It’s Crazy Joe!”

As Joe walked into the bar, expecting the welcome of a returning hero, he was met by jeers and shouts of derision. The crowd occasionally looked to the Man of Prestige to ensure he was still laughing.

“Drinks on me!”, Shouted the Man of Prestige, and the crowd followed him to the other end of the bar for their free gift for believing in his opinion.

Joe was near tears. His pitchman was in shock. After a moment, Joe spoke up. Looking at his pitchman, he said, “C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

They sat at the empty end of the bar as the Man of Prestige regaled the crowd with tales of himself and his ventures and investments. They watched in disgust for a few minutes, then Joe ordered two shots of scotch for each of them.

A few seats down, two strangers from another town sat. They had no idea who the Man of Prestige was, or why he was so quick to dismiss this possible great idea. They sat, quietly watching Joe and his pitchman shoot down their drinks, take one more forlorn look to the end of the bar, and get up to leave.

Then, they watched in incredulous disbelief as Joe create three solid gold coins from his index finger to pay for the drinks.

The strangers gaped as Joe and the pitchman walked out, then looked back to the gabbling madness surrounding the Man of Prestige, all of whom were oblivious to the great thing that had just happened.

The strangers jumped from their stools and ran off after Joe and the pitchman, pulling money from their pockets as they ran.

Today’s Web interfaces are all about the Flash (literally). Smooth charting, cool effects, callouts to references — ways to try and simplify complex data collections.

Problem-solving and diagnosis requires a far deeper dive than the flashiest interface could ever provide, because it comes down to the numbers. The actual measurements that make up the flashy chart. If you look at the data used by a professional trader and a someone at home looking at stock charts, there is a substantial difference.

When you get down to that level of analysis, the interface becomes irrelevant. Any analyst worth her or his salary (or salt – same thing) can tell you more from a spreadsheet full of relevant numbers than they can from any pretty graphic. This is true in any field.

When do traders or Web performance analysts use pretty charts? When they have to explain complex issues to non-technical or non-specialist audiences. When these analysts work on solving the sticky problems faced in the everyday world, they always fall back on the numbers.

Web performance data consists of the same few components, regardless of which company is providing the data. In effect, beyond a few key pieces of information about how the measurement data is captured, all Web performance data is the same.

Just because the components that make up the data are the same does not guarantee that the data from two different providers is of the same quality. In an imaginary system, Web performance data from all the major providers could flow into a centralized repository and be transformed using an XSLT or some other mangler so that it would be indistinguishable in most cases to tell which firm was the source.

But a skilled analyst would quickly learn to recognize the data that can be trusted. That would be the data that quickly and accurately represented the issues he was trying to diagnose. The data that flowed with the known patterns of the Web site. The data that helped him do his job more effectively.

In the end, a pretty interface can go a long way to hide the quality of the data that is being represented. A shiny gloss on poor data does not make it better data. It is critical that the data that underlies that pretty chart is able to live up to the quality demands of the people who use it every day.

Selling the interface is selling the brand. Trust in the data builds the reputation.

Which one sold you when you chose your Web performance measurement provider?

Yesterday in the Fast Company Live Fail Whale session [mention on Scoble's blog here], Paul Bucheit of FriendFeed jokingly said that his company’s external alerting mechanism was Louis Gray.

I cringed when I read that, as the last people who should be letting you know you have an issue are your visitors or customers. I know that FriendFeed is new and may not have the ops team that Dorion Carroll and Technorati have developed over the years, but it is still critical.

You have done a lot as a company to build a brand. Don’t let your internal and external performance sully your reputation. There are a number of low-cost and free ways to watch your performance and alert you before things break.

Louis Gray is a great guy. But he is not an objective and reliable way to alert you when something is wrong with your site.

Martin Schwimmer, a tradmark lawyer, has ignited a controversy over “commercial” aggregation services (here and here).

It poses an interesting argument. The gut-reaction instinct is to marginalize his comments as fringe element of the blogosphere. But Russell Beattie’s comments point out that line between public and private, personal and commercial use become extremely blurred in a new medium.

Perhaps what Martin Schwimmer should do is leap from the Trademark bubble and help DEFINE how a service such as Bloglines can use his content in a way that he agrees with. The law profession is far to reactive and non-solution oriented.

Don’t quote old broken rules; be a leader and make new, effective ones. Leadership comes from bold new initiatives and the willingness to see what is, and make what should and can be.

I issue a challenge to Martin Schwimmer: lead, don’t follow.