Those Banner Ads

It's been a long two days stomping out the brush fires ignited by our last 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 I got the chance to be guest editor.  In the span of a weekend, I heard from a lot of people that I didn't know before, and discovered a ton of creative journals that I did not know existed.  And then, just two days later, it all disappears, thanks to the inconceivable way that the higher ups of this company thought they could just walk all over us.  Unbelievable.  I have never encountered such a swing, from high to low, in such a short time.  It's incredibly sad for EVERYONE.  And for the life of me, I cannot fathom how NO ONE at AOL has the decency to at least address the situation.  What are they waiting for?  The damage has already been done-there are folks that won't be coming back even if the ads disappear now. -- Jim

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

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

Tag: AntiJournalsAds

What this will do:  When you click this link, you'll see a list of all blog entries and other stuff tagged the same way.  More to the point, anyone at AOL can do the same thing and see what people are saying in one place.  Note that you don't have to use Journals to make 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 to post 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 right people.  We'll see what happens.  Personally, I'd love to do some revenue sharing between content creators and us; I think this is a case where everybody could win by taking smaller pieces of the pie while growing the pie.  That won't happen quickly, though, for technical reasons.