If an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters....

Discouraged by no sales of my spreadsheet budget after a couple of weeks' trying, I turned again to internet publishing to renew my hopes of rewarding enterprise. I'd like to call it internet publishing because blog sounds so blug, though it's just a lazy word for weblog, but internet publishing sounds like a respectable use of my time.

I quickly decided I'm too old to fight the code for setting up my own site from scratch with Frontpage or MySQL or Perl modules, etc., which younger geeks seem to take to like ducks to water, and my best bet would be to either use this space on Writetosayit or start afresh with another blog. The thing about blogs on established host sites is that they're so easy to set up and maintain that I can get a lot of bang for my buck with minimal technical hassle. So I went shopping for another space to vent my angst.

There are many free and low-cost blog hosting sites out there, and I've tried several over the years. But one which was still on Google's directory of weblog hosts was BlogHi. BlogHi used to be very appealing to me. Along with Writetosayit, my nbknotes blog there attracted me to write well over a hundred posts, and offered several strengths I haven't found either here at Blogspot or anywhere else. Not only was it a free blogsite, it was the best-syndicated and best-set-up site of any I found, and within several months I found my posts reaching hundreds through the rss links and the site itself.

Out of curiosity I clicked it again, and was amazed to find my former blog still just as I had left it when I took my portrait avatar and my xml file of posts I'd written, and migrated to wordpress. The posts were gone, but the notebook template, header, and other sections and choices I'd made earlier were still there, all ready for me to just write another post! In fact, since I still have that .xml and .jpg, I realized I could quickly restore everything to my former BlogHi blog and continue as if I had never dropped out! Maybe my search for a "new" blog was over.

So I wrote and posted a little blurb welcoming myself back after a few years' hiatus, and felt really good about using BlogHi's comfortable and efficient, user-friendly and intuitive features. I was home again, in a sense.

In fact, with its advantages, I couldn't think why I left in the first place. I remembered a rough patch when the owner, an engineer at a Munich company, got out of it and sold it to someone else. I had scrambled to save my posts and migrate to another site before BlogHi closed up shop.

But what I had forgotten was the real reason I left BlogHi. And as I proudly reviewed my page as published, I scrolled down and instantly remembered. There, at the bottom, was what appeared to be some sort of box ad for a GPS device, with a button to push for more information. Foolishly, I pushed it, and made a few cents for the new BlogHi owners through Google's AdSense. You see, at BlogHi, the writer benefits from a free space to blog and post all he wants, but the company gets the money that accrues from advertising on the published pages, not the author.

I was livid. In fact, I remember blogging against that unfairness at BlogHi itself when I was getting quite a number of hits, only to find many of my fellows commenting, "Hey, it's a win-win situation, isn't it? We get free blogspace and syndication; they get some revenue to defray their costs."

That's not the way I saw it. I figured if I wrote it and chose to let Google put some non-intrusive ads on my pages through AdSense, I should get the revenue, or at least the bigger part of it, not the host. I felt like one of the proverbial infinite number of monkeys chained to an infinite number of typewriters, pecking away endlessly to see if all the great books would be written. That, I realized, was what really drove me from BlogHi hosting. I didn't want to feel like an employee every time I sat down to enter a post, with someone else reaping the profit of my efforts.

It's not that I expect to get rich at blogging or "internet publishing" of any kind, and I recognize that few personal blogs attract that kind of traffic to generate more than a pittance of revenue. But it's that the policy of BlogHi taking the potential pot with no way to reward the writer kills the hope of tangible rewards. And every writer hopes for tangible rewards in time, no matter who he or she is.

A host can't just give us a ream of blank paper and say, "Go to it, Bubba." We write and we publish our ideas because we hope that over time somehow we'll attract readers. And we hope that if our words attract enough readers, we'll be able to make some money at it. AdSense is the most accessible way a writer has to do that. Take that collection plate away, and the hope of income goes with it. We're left with only the rewards of seeing our ideas in print and receiving readers' comments--significant rewards to be sure, but not tangible.

I haven't tried AdSense here yet, and I doubt I will. There's something about spotting some ad for a GPS on my blog page that raises my dander. But I may try it on another blogsite, just to keep the hope of tangible reward alive.