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I've been using Google adsense for the advertising on non-gold member blogs for awhile now, but their payout has been steadily decreasing over the past year and so I decided to try something different.
Today I turned on ads from "Project Wonderful", which is a transparent marketplace for ads which is based on an auction.
Basically I set up the ad spots and then on anyone can bid to show their ad in that space. Bids are based on a cost per day (regardless of click through) and is always given to the highest bidder.
Right now the high bid is $0.02 a day, but I'm hoping that competition will drive it up a bit.
The bidders only pay for each second that the ad is the highest bidder, so if you're outbid you only pay for the time that you were actually being shown.
One thing I like about this is that I can approve all ads that are shown; on Adsense you can only ban ads that have already loaded but you can't approve them beforehand.
If you, for instance, are interested in advertising almost anything across pleonast (and helping support the site!) you could do it right now for as little $0.03 a day. Just go here to sign up!
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An interestingly soviet take from 1984 on one of my favorite short stories, There will come soft rains by Ray Bradbury
This brought back alot of memories - during my stint in Florida College Forensics ('99) I competed with a POI (Programmed Oral Interpretation) on the theme of mankind and apocalyptic nuclear war that included excerpts from this short story, On The Beach by Nevil Shute, the poem by Sara Teasdale that inspired Bradbury, and quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer (head scientist on the Manhattan project).
It was clearly over the judges heads, which is why I never even broke into a finals round with it, but it was and still is very meaningful to me. In general, the cold war has always been one of the most intriguing historical eras to me - perhaps it's in my blood, as my grandfather was a B-52 pilot in the Strategic Air Command (ever seen Dr. Strangelove? My grandpa was like the guy riding the bomb, just without the cowboy hat :) [editor's note: actually he did wear cowboy hats ... maybe kubrick was inspired by my grandpa]
I doubt that many people of my generation or younger realize just how close it came at some points in the 60s and 70s to all-out nuclear war, and just how serious we could have destroyed ourselves. I thank God that it never went that far, and perhaps He's the real reason it didn't.
There will come soft rains
and the smell of ground
the swallows circling
and their shimmering sound
and frogs in the pools
singing at night
and wild plum-trees
in tremulous white
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
if mankind perished utterly
And Spring herself,
when she woke at dawn,
would scarcely know
that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale, 1920
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Kevin Kelly (one of my favorite thinkers) has written a blog post that has some of the clearest thinking about global climate change that I've read and more specifically the trade-offs that must be considered when thinking in the long-term. I seriously wish that our national/international dialog would try to stay rational, but alas it has indeed become religious warfare.
The entry was posted on the Long Now Foundation website, which is a fascinating organization dedicated to long-term thinking. One of their projects, which you might have heard of, is the Long Bets website, which is an "arena for accountable predictions", in other words a place to create accountability for long-term predictions.
In general though, Long Now foundation blog posts are fascinating because they are a relief from the onesecondMTVcameracut world, where anything older than about 30 seconds is ancient history. They even put an extra digit in front of their years to avoid the Y10K bug. It's really refreshing taking the long look once in awhile. |
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