Another Review-Of-Sorts

Im watching ‘Bobby’ right now.Its almost the end of the movie. The hero and the heroine just jumped in to a river, after Raju’s dialogue about being stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, Maut and Zindagi as good as maut.

The bus is moving amidst lush green fields. Grey clouds touch the leaves as they allow only diffuse sunlight through them and into the air conditioned bus. I have resigned my attention to the movie after giving up on the book that now lies on my lap. I cannot take pics as my camera is locked in the “dikki” below.

Usual 70s hindi movie. Rishi Kapoor. Dimple Kapadia. Both have acted quite well. Plot moves from one scene to the other bridge by heavy dialogue, whose logic i cannot get. Still, the undying devotion of the hero-heroine pair for each other runs ringingly through out. A plot of of a rich boy falling in love with the daughter of a poor fisherman, with the stereotypical rich father accusing the fisherman that its all a ploy to “steal” his daulat. And how, after much breaking and rejoinder of hearts and artefacts, and after much accusing and assertion of ones duty as parents, nanny and gal’s father etc, alls well. And good songs too.

Pran just called Bobby his beti. Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Pran and Mr. Braganza are walking hand in hand, down a hill with the sun setting in the background, after a motor bike chase, trekking on fancy shoes, swimming in treacherous waters, and being rescued.

Not at all a bad movie. Worth a watch. Especially if you are journeying quite a long journey, in a bus after missing a train owing to the Indian Railway’s use of the 24 hour system.

Putting some (Ad)Sense into the folks behind WordPress.com

The lure of lucre is a strong one indeed. Especially since getting it can be as easy as a bit of javascript on a page for which you don’t even need pay for being hosted.

I didn’t much care about hosting adsense on my blog. I thought the money made was amazingly little, if at all. Another thing was the usual “money is the root of all evil” dictum, alongside ‘fears’ that this blog would become yet another money making machine with no soul. All said, that sort of fear would really just boil down to fear of the unknown, or fear of change. But heck, the money you can make is no small change, it’s wads of cash, especially when converted from American Dollars to Indian Rupees.

So when I heard of the Ad-ventures of a few friends of mine, I did get tempted, and got my very first AdSense account. But ahh…. blogs hosted on wordpress.com can not run their own Javascript code! It gets snipped off.

But surely some very good blogs use WordPress…. and there’d be a good number of them wanting to convert that to monetary terms? Checking on the wordpress.com forums says there are, but they are constrained by wordpress, and have been clamouring for an Adsense widget since ages, and WP.com doesn’t seem to be doing much about it, though they were thinking of making it a paid upgrade in 2006. Because apparently an overwhelming majority wanted wordpress to be ad-free.

The logic they spout is a bit flawed, but I will get to that in a minute.

There seemed to be no other avenue… the only way to make cool cash would be to start a page on Blogger. But heck, what about the cool features offered on wordpress.com? And I certainly don’t want to shift any of my pages permanently to Blogger.

So I thought I’d maintain a page on Blogger, and crosspost any future posts, along with exporting all my current posts to there. Started a Blogger.com blog. I winced at the cluttered Dashboard, the absence of blog stats (I’d have to fool around with Google Analytics a wee bit before I got that running, and even after I’d've done that, I wouldn’t have it integrated with Blogger, and I’d have to work at making sure my visits weren’t counted…), the colour scheme, the lackluster themes, the lack of a clean-looking interface, the editor which wasn’t even a patch on WP’s WYSIWYG editor. I winced the thought of a popup comments page. But maybe it’s just fear of change.

But haha, I can’t import all my current posts to Blogger the way I can from a WP.com ID. Manual posting is simply not an option, what with 150+ posts on this blog and 100+ on ChuckleAndGuffaw. I mean, how hard is it to make an import import-from-wordpress tool? Think there’s a web app here.

And why can’t wordpress.com, which has all these jingchak features, add a widget so that people can make money from their blogs? Users attribute a variety of reasons.

First is the usual “wordpress.com is for those who love blogging for the soul of it, not for those who want to get rich quick” argument. And next are the “an overwhelming number of users voted for wordpress.com to be ad-free”, and the “Ads are Bad” arguments.These hold no water in the face of Adsense in its current form.

Firstly, it’s Targeted Advertising, which in essence means you’d probably see a “C/C++ programmers wanted” ad on a blog about coding, and not one about hand-painted pillowcases. And gone are the days when no company worth its salt would advertize on the Net that no ad you’d see was worth clicking. Gone too are the days of jang-bang banner and popup advertizing, which we’ve trained ourselves to instinctively avoid. Adsense ads are unobtrusive in themselves, and the only way you’d make them obtrusive was if you place them in the middle of a piece of writing. People also fear blogs being created just for the purpose of advertising… dear ones, how many would visit an ad-blog? How much cash would that blog get, more so when you compare it to a well-written popular blog, which is keyword-rich as well as non-spam that the targeted advertising really achieves its goals more easily? And considering this is valid, wouldn’t you just be depriving someone who writes well and wants to make their hobby pay? And is probably writhing at the thought of lesser blogs generating more than just social capital?

If at all people really hated advertising, wouldn’t they just avoid blogs full of ads, thus making it counterproductive to have ads on your blog?

And wouldn’t people shift to other blogging sites if, for the same effort, they’d get more returns for doing so? I’m not so sure wow features are an issue with most people.

Another reason given by a user is that wordpress.com uses our blogs for ads (can be viewed only for people who hit the blog during searching, and not for regular users), and so you’ll have two adsense scripts running at the same time, and Adsense might terminate either account. This totally negates the “users say no ads on wordpress.com” argument. And so if you need advertising to keep your domain running, shouldn’t you make some leeway for users who are willing to pay to run their own ads on their blogs?

So much for the arguments… I’m not very hopeful of WordPress.com having a sidebar widget for Adsense in the near future. And if I really do want to make blogging pay, I’ll have to look at alternatives, while keeping my other interests within sight. How that is to be done, I don’t know properly yet. Till something turns up, any ideas, any thoughts, anyone?