Burn, baby, burn

For a while I've toyed with the thought of putting advertising on my site. Used to be that ads were standard, a tradeoff for getting free blog space from Blogger and Google. Now ads are offered as a special program from Blogger, whereby bloggers can earn cash based on ad clickthroughs. For blogs that get thousands of hits a day (like, say, Cooking For Engineers, whose wild and sustained popularity still bewilders me) this seems like a good deal, but for poor lonely schlubs like me (no disrespect intended towards my valued readers) the potential traffic doesn't seem to justify the sense that you are whoring your site.
On the other hand, the ads placed by Google's expert programs do tend to be based on cues taken from your blog text, so they can be pretty funny and incredibly off-base. Sammie is exploiting that aspect of them on her site.

I've placed my first ad on this site. It's for a friend's soy candle business - well, he sells more than just candles, but you can get the details from his site. I have bought a few votives from him myself, and I can vouch that they smell nice and burn cleanly and last a long time. Please stop by his site and see if anything catches your eye.

(I decided to follow his lead and start my own side business. Working to my strengths, I grabbed some pencils from the supply cabinet at work, stuck them in a cup, and began to write a note that would say "PLEASE BUY A PENCIL. $5. I AM BLIND. GOD BLESS YOU." I realized that this was fundamentally dishonest, and replaced the word "BLIND" with "LAZY". I'm still waiting for my first customer. We'll just see what happens when someone tries to get a pencil out of the supply cabinet...)

UPDATE: The ad button was wreaking havoc on the format of my site when viewed in Internet Explorer - all of the stuff that should be on the right-hand sidebar was instead in a stack at the bottom of the page. Maybe the ad was just too wide. I've replaced the ad button with a text link in its own separate "Ads!" section.