Those Banner Ads

It's been a long two days stomping out the brush fires ignited by ourlast install.  And on top of that... the banner ads.  Oh, the ads.

Quote:

I was never happier to be a part of this than I was last Friday, when Igot the chance to be guest editor.  In the span of a weekend, Iheard from a lot of people that I didn't know before, and discovered aton of creative journals that I did not know existed.  And then,just two days later, it all disappears, thanks to the inconceivable waythat the higher ups of this company thought they could just walk allover us.  Unbelievable.  I have never encountered such aswing, from high to low, in such a short time.  It's incrediblysad for EVERYONE.  And for the life of me, I cannot fathom how NOONE at AOL has the decency to at least address the situation. What are they waiting for?  The damage has already beendone-there are folks that won't be coming back even if the adsdisappear now. -- Jim

Personal opinion, as a blogger?  The ads suck.  The communication aboutthe ads?  Not so good.  And the release problems?  Alsonot our finest hour.  So, I'm feeling pretty down overall.

Now then... Given that the situation is what it is, what can we doabout it?  A dialog would be good.  People are commenting on Joe and John's blogs andgrouping and writing petitionsand emails, which is great.  I'd suggest oneadditional thing:  Post your opinion on your blog.  That'swhat they're for, right?  And when you do, one more technicalsuggestion that might possibly help with the dialog.  Tag yourpost by adding this snippet at the end:

Tag: AntiJournalsAds

What this will do:  When you click this link, you'll see a list of allblog entries and other stuff tagged the same way.  More to thepoint, anyone at AOL can do the same thing and see what people aresaying in one place.  Note that you don't have to use Journals tomake this work.

(If you choose Viewas [HTML], you should see this: <a rel="tag"href="http://technorati.com/tag/AntiJournalsAds">AntiJournalsAds</a>.)

I'm assuming here that the posts are actually anti-ads; if you want topost in favor of them, feel free to create a ProJournalsAds tag. I'm not holding my breath.

Aside from that, we are all working to get your feedback to the rightpeople.  We'll see what happens.  Personally, I'd love to dosome revenue sharing between content creators and us; I think this is acase where everybody could win by taking smaller pieces of the piewhile growing the pie.  That won't happen quickly, though, for technical reasons.