The Living Textbook

I'm really excited. Obviously like everybody else, whether we want to admit it or not, I hope to generate some revenue from my work, which in my case is writing. Several months ago, I started receiving an email from Joel Comm. If Joel is everything he says he is, he's done very well finanically from his Web 2.0 work. Well I got excited by some of what he said and decided to buy his book. (I followed the advice in the book and lo and behold I LOST money. I generated less money from my ads.) Several days ago I decided to look at his blog and see how he set up the ads instead of reading his book. The ads are set inside of the text. Well I tried doing that today. I wrote about the U.S. House decision yesterday to bring home the troops within a year. After an introdcution, I wrote the words "Discussion Questions." I then included the Google Ads. Then I wrote the questions.

Well, when you look at the webpage now, it looks as if the ads actually bring you to lessons about the first paragraph. (The ads are clearly marked with Google's name.) I obviously hope that people read my questions. I love writing them. But I don't make a regular pay check. I'm a new independent consultant and I guarantee that many months go by when teachers with my experience make four times the amount of money that I make. (Actually there are some months when I make nothing.) One very well known and well respected blogger told me that he'd had to put up his house for remortgage twice in order to make ends meet as he was developing his career. I guess I'm being apologetic for trying to make some money by having people click ads.

Take a look at the page and let me know if you think it's OK.

By the way, before I close I just wanted to show something that I saw on Joel Comm's website this morning:

I treat my online businesses pretty seriously. I have to. They feed and house my
family and that's a pretty serious business. But sometimes I wonder if I'm not
missing something.

Just surf at random around the blogs at Blogger.com and you'll come across a bunch of sites that have been put up for no other reason than to make the people who write them smile.

They might make the half-dozen or so regular readers of each of those blogs smile too, but I doubt if those sites are making enough even to cover the cost of the coffee drunk while typing the posts.

I'm not sure how to take Joel's perspective from this first paragraph, but think sometimes a smile is worth a lot more than a dollar or even all the money in the world. But it's hard to think that way when you've got a growling stomach.

I wonder if other on-line writers ever wonder about the ethics of making money on-line.