Policy Change

Since I began posting on Fractals of Change at the beginning of last year, there have been ads on the site and, once the capability was invented, ads in the feed that you see in a feedreader or in email if you subscribe that way.  Don’t make  much money from these, a few hundred dollars in a good month; so, if I had a day job, I wouldn’t be able to quit.

The ads are in the right sidebar and in between the posts.  The content of the posts is not influenced by ads although it is certainly colored by my view of the world.  When I have a potential conflict of interest, I disclose it.  All ads are clearly recognizable as such, I thought, and cleanly separate from editorial.

Not quite!  I caught myself in a violation of my own rules.

Whenever I referred to a book, I linked to a page on Amazon where you could buy said book.  If you did make that purchase or any others on that trip into Amazon, I got paid.  Actually, these were links which were followed relatively frequently.  The posts are about books that I like, and you and I have somewhat similar tastes or you wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place.  I didn’t post book reviews to earn Amazon dollars but links from my book reviews earned Amazon dollars.  So couldn’t really say that the editorial and advertising are strictly separate.

Now they are separate.  My new policy – which you may not care about at all – is to link to the website of the book itself when a book title appears in a post.  If the book has no website,  the link is to the wikipedia article about the book.  Books I find interesting also appear as ads in the right sidebar.  Follow those links which do look like ads and, if you buy, I get paid.  A side effect of this change is that it is a little harder to buy a book which appears in a post.

Most blogs are intensely personal or clearly commercial in purpose and most bloggers don’t need to worry about issues like this.  However, from time to time I have wandered off into what is beginning to be called citizen journalism or networked journalism.  My posts and/or pointers to them sometimes appear on sites with earned citizen journalism credentials like Center for Citizen Media,  newassignment.net, and buzzmachine. So I’ve got to be more finicky.