Virtually Madison Avenue

Check it out: Recondite now has Google AdSense^™ towers in the sidebar. I would have done it from the founding of the blog, only Google wouldn't have me until now. First, they said that their topic analyzer didn't give good results (i.e., couldn't choose appropriate ads) for the blog. Next they said Recondite didn't meet their policy standards, but I contested that decision and they later reversed themselves. I suspect it was the sentence "I hate W." which was classified as hate speech rather than political discourse...

For those who don't know about AdSense: it's Google's program to place ads on the pages of independent web-sites. Google selects and places ad content on a participating website, and pays the publisher for click through.

You have no idea what satisfaction it gives me to be living in the world I imagined fifteen years ago. Of course, I thought micro-publishing would involve micro-payments, not Google aggregating the payments until it was worth writing me a check.¹ But that's a detail.²

So here we are; the future has arrived — every man his own (commercial) publisher at less effort than, say, writing a letter. An opinion utopia, Gentlemen, if you can keep it.

[1] In Recondite's case, I suspect they may never have to write one.

[2] A detail, that is, to someone who wants to make predictions. For someone like me who tried to create micro-payment protocols, it was more than a detail. But let that one pass.