Sierra Kilo

[rant]

Advertisements (and in some ways Commercialism, itself) are the leading cause of the degradation of society, in my opinion. Advertisements are greed incarnate. Many magazines are 3/5 content, 2/5 advertisement. A 30-minute slot on TV consists of about 22 minutes of content, 8 minutes of advertisement. E-mail spam can be 100% of your daily content.

Advertisements are rarely for any products that you would be interested in, though. In 60 minutes worth of prime-time TV (i.e. 44 minutes of content, 16 minutes of advertisement), there may be 2 advertisements for products that you might be interested in. That’s a 1/16 (0.625%) success rate (assuming each ad is 30 seconds) for TV.

E-mail, however, is totally different. The costs of producing e-mail ads (i.e. spam) is significantly lower than TV ads. But, then again, the success rate is much lower, too.

I bring this up because I got slammed with comment spam recently. Not “WoW is the greatest game ever, so come check us out at…” or “Need a better HDTV? Come to…” It was porn and casinos, mainly. If you’re going to spam me and my readers, at least do it with stuff we’ll be interested in: Games, Gadgets, and The Goods.

So, I’ve turned on more spam filters and some comment moderation. I guess that’s the price of having a slice of internet traffic, no matter how razor-thin it is. On the up-side, traffic for November is the highest I’ve had so far. Most of that is due to spammers, though, I believe. It’s hard to check, so I’ll just be the optimist and say “Thank you” to my readers

And, I promise, no matter how many readers I have, I will never place ads here. You can rest assured that if you have a hankerin’ for a MacBook Pro, an XBox 360, ReplayTV, or just an old-school MUD after reading my site, it won’t be because of some Flash banner or Adsense. Power to the people? Yes, have some.

[/rant]