Blah. Enough about that.

I don’t make enough money to pay for hosting the blog. I’m not in it for the money else I’d have quit this years ago. But the checks are a nice little gift, and I use them to buy beads.

Behold!

Christmas vomited on my desk.

I ordered a bunch of Swarovski crystals — it’s much cheaper to do this online than in person at Michael’s — and some sterling silver snowflake charms and oval jump rings. The wire swirls were created by me using some Parawire and some red, green and gold colored seed beads. My plan is to combine all of this sparkle into some holiday earrings.

Anyway, in my travels, I found this ad:

You all pretty much know I’m not a reader of Dooce’s blog*. And I know a lot of you are. And that’s cool. But even you have to admit that “Family Fun Articles” and “Dooce” is a pretty big stretch.

I mean, if you’re looking for fun things to do with your kids you’re going to French Toast Girl or Secret Agent Josephine or … another crafty mom blog. There are hundreds of them.

Dooce isn’t going to tell you how to make Play-doh from scratch. She’s going to tell you how much Grey Goose she drank when she found some store-bought Play-doh that was ground into her fair-trade Persian-yarn looped rug while she was traveling to speak on a panel. Then she’ll link to the rug on some website and you’ll see how much she paid for it. Then she’ll post a highly touched up black and white photo of her left eye and piss off the LDS in one fell swoop. That’s blog talent. But it’s not Family Fun.

Which leads me to wonder what in the hell they were thinking at McD’s when they decided to create an ad that had to spider through YEARS of archives (her daughter is 6 now) to find four blog posts that may mention “fun” in them?

This isn’t Dooce’s fault – I almost feel badly for her because it’s like her name and image are being grossly misused to hawk Chicken McNuggets.

(Then I think about the dump trucks of cash her blog brings in and I don’t feel so bad.)

It’s the fault of the marketers who completely don’t understand the online culture – who think that you can just find the most famous blogger out there and they’d be a great fit for whatever you’re selling.

Or the ones who won’t run ads on the local news section of the paper because they want to target women.

Or the ones who pay big bucks to cookie my computer and run World of Warcraft ads on every site I visit – blissfully ignorant of the fact that I got that cookie in the first place because I visited WoW fan sites BECAUSE I play WoW so … showing me an ad beseeching me to try World of Warcraft free for 10 days isn’t going to work.

It’s a waste of money.

Everytime a woman clicks that McD’s ad and goes to Dooce and says, “That blog McD’s sent me to wasn’t about Family Fun” and stops clicking on McD’s ads altogether…

Everytime a woman reading about the town council meeting doesn’t see that breast cancer screening ad because it ran only on the food section…

Everytime World of Warcraft looks at their reports and puzzle over why the clickthrough rates are tiny, even though they have the best targeting they could possibly buy…

…someone gets the idea in their head that online advertising doesn’t work.

It does work. It just requires some thought.

*I used to be, long ago. We grew apart.

I used the Google AdSense program for 2 years, and I didn’t even earn enough to get my first $100 payment.

Here’s my stance on ads…I don’t mind them at all. If I (or more likely someone else) can earn a few bucks for a future rainy day just with a few blocks of code, then that’s great. I’m also completely in favor of the recent FTC ruling that requires bloggers who review items to admit they’re received the items for free if that’s the case. Many bloggers are upset, claiming that professional reviewers don’t have to disclose they received review copies of products.

The differences is that when you read the newspaper (and we all do, yes?) you KNOW that person you’re reading is a paid reviewer and that s/he’s trying that product out for free or is reimbursed for the cost. When you read someone’s personal blog and they start mentioning a product over and over, you think they’re a fan of the product. If they happen to omit the fact that they were flown to NYC for a weekend courtesy of the company that makes that product, it adds a certain shadiness to the blog. And I don’t like shadiness.

So here’s to the beginning of (hopefully) a beautiful little partnership.

In completely unrelated news, I have to get rid of the “Beach” theme for Gmail, as it depresses me every night when the sun sets on the theme. I get that icky “last day of vacation” feeling.

Back then, the most common (and I believe only) ad size on our site was this:

Now as monitors get larger, web sites get larger and of course the ads get larger. Someone has to make sure the lowly web folk get paid.

Anyway, I saw THIS ad today:

Clicky to embiggen!

and I totally wish I designed that. I have no formal design experience, but I know that ads shouldn’t be cluttered, and the main point of a banner ad is to get someone to click on it.

(It’s for Merry Maids, by the way.)

I wish I could express that better to people who want me to make the artwork smaller so I can fit their fax number on the ad.

**

Dream 1: There is a form I need to fill out for work and the deadline is midnight. It’s about 11:55 pm, and I’m at work, dashing through the cubicle maze in the dark and trying desperately to find that form. I’m running into chairs and desks and filing cabinets and I’m in a full-fledged panic.

Then my work PC suddenly goes into an 8-bit display mode, and begins to run programs. It’s been hacked! “It’s the South Koreans,” an unfamiliar IT person tells me. “They’re always doing this sh-t.”

Dream 2: I’m a lawyer trying to get the death penalty overturned for somebody. It’s a race against the clock as they are literally prepping my client for execution while I recite my plea to the judge.

This dream is courtesy of the execution of the Virginia sniper. I’m anti-death penalty, no matter what, so whenever a capital punishment sentence is carried out, I’m subconsciously very upset about it.

And this year I have reason to rejoice, because they feature the recipient of my very first fan letter, Jason Bateman.

Jason played “David,” the oldest brother on the sitcom Valerie, which was then called Valerie’s Family then the Hogan family after Valerie Harper quit the show. He was a handsome, roguish type, and in a scene from the opening of the show that forever remains burned in my brain, he played hockey. (Go here and forward to the :33 mark. Rawr!)

And now he’s 39 years old. And ohmigod….

…wow…