I'm not sure I like the idea of blogging for profit. That's probably partly because I spend a lot of time blogging about the Grid Engine open source project. (Download Grid Engine 6.0u4 here!) It seems somehow wrong to try to make money by pushing your expertise about an open source code base. (Any particular colors or flightless birds come to mind?)

For the rest of what I post, I'm honestly flattered that anyone reads it. (Thank you! Yes, you.) Using my voice on the Internet as a vehicle for collecting click-through bounties seems to me like it would be self defeating. Right now I post when I have something to say. If I were actually worried about hit counts, I would be forcing myself to post content even when I didn't have any. The net result would be something much more artificial.

I understand that there are some important parallels that can be drawn to newspaper editorials and print ads, but I think there are also some important differences. For example, newspaper ads are static. You can ignore them. Back in the 90's, I was a member of LinkExchange, which was basically an ad swap. (Their domain name appears to belong to Microsoft now.) You carry other people's ads, and they'll carry yours. I thought it was great, but that was before animated images, DHTML, and Flash dominated the online ad world. It was possible to ignore the ads. Now I've constantly got bouncing pigs and "shoot the bunny" games dragging my attention away from what I'm trying to read. Especially annoying are the ads with sound. My point is that static ads are fine, but I'm not about to annoy my readers with a bunch of dancing bologna. And would I hope other bloggers extend me the same courtesy.

Whether to blog for profit or not is a personal decision. I personally see animated ads as an indication of a lack of respect for the readers and medium, but that's my opinion, and it's worth every cent you paid for it.