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.

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

The idea that blogs generate a personal brand is as old as the “blogosphere”. It’s one of those topics that rages through the blog world every few months. Inexorably the discussion winds its way to the idea that a blog is linked exclusively to the creators of its content. This makes a blog, no matter what side of the discussion you fall on, the online representation of a personal brand that is as strong as a brand generated by an online business.

And just as corporate brands are affected by the performance of their Web sites, a personal brand can suffer just as much when something causes the performance of a blog Web site to degrade in the eyes of the visitors. For me, although my personal brand is not a large one, this happened yesterday when Disqus upgraded to multiple databases during the middle of the day, causing my site to slow to a crawl.

I will restrain my comments on mid-day maintenance for another time.

The focus of this post is the effect that site performance has on personal branding. In my case, the fact that my blog site slowed to a near standstill in the middle of the day likely left visitors with the impression that my blog about Web performance was not practicing what it preached.

For any personal brand, this is not a good thing.

In my case, I was able to draw on my experience to quickly identify and resolve the issue. Performance returned to normal when I temporarily disabled the Disqus plugin (it has since been reactivated). However, if I hadn’t been paying attention, this performance degradation could have continued, increasing the negative effect on my personal brand.

Like many blogs, Disqus is only one of the outside services I have embedded in my site design. Sites today rely on AdSense, Lookery, Google Analytics, Statcounter, Omniture, Lijit, and on goes the list. These services have become as omnipresent in blogs as the content. What needs to be remembered is that these add-ons are often overlooked as performance inhibitors.

Many of these services are built using the new models of the over-hyped and mis-understood Web 2.0. These services start small, and, as Shel Israel discussed yesterday, need to focus on scalability in order to grow and be seen as successful, rather than cool, but a bit flaky. As a result, these blog-centric services may affect performance to a far greater extent than the third-party apps used by well-established, commercial Web sites.

I am not claiming that any one of these services in and of themselves causes any form of slowdown. Each has its own challenges with scaling, capacity, and success. It is the sheer number of the services that are used by blog designers and authors poses the greatest potential problem when attempting to debug performance slowdowns or outages. The question in these instances, in the heat of a particularly stressful moment in time, is always: Is it my site or the third-party?

The advice I give is that spoken by Michael Dell: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Yesterday, I initiated monitoring of my personal Disqus community page, so I could understand how this service affected my continuing Web performance. I suggest that you do the same, but not just of this third-party. You need to understand how all of the third-party apps you use affect how your personal brand performance is perceived.

Why is this important? In the mind of the visitor, the performance problem is always with your site. As with a corporate site that sees a sudden rise in response times or decrease in availability, it does not matter to the visitor what the underlying cause of the issue is. All they see is that your site, your brand (personal or corporate), is not as strong or reliable as they had been led to believe.

The lesson that I learned yesterday, one that I have taught to so many companies but not heeded myself, is that monitoring the performance of all aspects of your site is critical. And while you as the blog designer or writer might not directly control the third-party content you embed in your site, you must consider how it affects your personal brand when something goes wrong.

You can then make an informed decision on whether the benefit of any one third-party app is outweighed by the negative effect it has on your site performance and, by extension, your personal brand.

This morning I launched Bipolar Lives, a blog that discusses the broad issues and personal challenges of living with Bipolar Syndrome.

Readers of this blog will know that I was diagnosed with Bipolar I in 2006. It’s a condition I am very open about and that is a challenge (and an opportunity) that I live with. Medication, therapy, and a loving and very understanding family help me make through each day.

Bipolar Lives will present research, ramblings, personal experiences, and other things of interest to people with Bipolar.

Come over if you want to learn a little about how we see the normal people.

Since November 5 2004 (Geez! Have I been blogging that long?), I have written 1,744 posts (this is 1,745). So, as you can well imagine, I can’t remember whats in most of them. I know which ones are the most popular and what’s in those, but on the whole, I couldn’t tell you what’s in most of the posts I have put up in nearly four years.

So it always astounds me when someone goes to one the more obscure posts. Astounds me to the point that I have to go to the site and find out what I said.

The long tail meets the absent-minded.

Or should I say, welcome back.

Three years ago when I started blogging on a regular basis, the blog was name The Newest Industry after the Husker Du song of the same name. Then I migrated the content to Wordpress.com, and relinquished hosting it myself.

Well, I have decided to resurrect Newest Industry, but with all the same shiny content you would find at the Crazy Canuck Chronicles.

So, if it’s been a while, welcome back. Otherwise, a simple hello.

Through 2007, the number of posts I made per day/week/month decreased steadily. I know post new items 2-3 items a month, or less. After 2 years of steady entries, I just didn’t have anything to add to the conversation.

Having been an A-list groupie for this entire period, I lost touch with the self-perpetuating scene. A comment that I saw on Top Gear summed it up: Jeremy Clarkson had another chat show host on, and they both commented on how all British chat show hosts end up appearing on each others shows.

That’s how blogging began to feel to me. I began to step back.

I stepped back from true, active day-to-day management of GrabPERF.

I drifted, intellectually and emotionally.

I found the sharp edge of my humor, which had wandered off and gone hitchhiking through the British Isles disguised as Roger Daltrey for six months.

The last few weeks I have been asking myself if I want to go back to blogging, if I want to continue to produce the random ideas for the world to see.

The death of my grandmother a few weeks ago brought my world back into sharp focus. Who is going to see these stories, these tales? Who will be the keeper of my intellectual flame? What will people know of me when I fade away.

I will be trying to storm back. My brain is here.

I AM THOR, GOD OF THUNDER.

Ok…maybe that was delusional. But hang on for another wild ride.

I know that I have been bad at blogging news about GrabPERF, but today there is some. In the last two weeks, we have added two measurement locations: Washington DC AOL and Argentina LaNacion.

Thanks to Carson Evans of AOL, and Jose Falvo and Leonardo Lancellotta of LaNacion for helping out with the installation process.

So, on New Years Eve, due to the vagaries of modern air travel, the family will be spending seven hours at Sea-Tac waiting for the second leg of our trip home.

For me, this is usually not an issue, as I can huddle up in a corner with my wireless connection and while away the hours with work and general interest. However, we will be a one laptop family, and my children need to be entertained.

Likely at least an hour of the trip will be handled by immigration as they subject us to the joys of entry with our Advanced Parole documents. It’s now harder for us to get into the US via air as late process Green Card applicants than it is if we were simply visiting the country.

After that, who knows.

Does anyone out there in blog land have any great suggestions for entertaining a family for seven hours at an airport?

Don’t really need to explain this, do we?

Via Core77 and LuxuryLaunches