Disruptive Conversations

 Because I am fascinated by this grand experiment called "social media", I like to play with various aspects just to see what might happen.  So for the last couple of months, I've been experimenting with ads in a couple of my RSS feeds through the Feedburner Ad Network.  I definitely do not expect to make any money off of it... for me it's more an experiment to see if anyone actually clicks through on ads in RSS feeds!

Due to the higher number of subscribers, most placements have been targeted toward my Blue Box podcast, and it's been both interesting and entertaining to see what ad campaigns are requested.  Because I feel a certain level of responsibility and respect for Blue Box listeners/subscribers, I'm very picky about what I let run.  There have been a few that were appropriate... and a few that weren't.

The newest campaign I was asked to approve, though, gave my head a bit of a spin. As you can see in the image to the right (click for a larger view), it's a campaign by Sun Microsystems to promote CEO Jonathan Schwartz's weblog!  As you'll note, I approved it since I figured it might actually be something of interest to our listeners (and you can see my nice spray paint job in Windows Paint to obscure the campaign details :-).  But think about this for a minute...  here is a very large company spending some of its advertising dollars to promote a weblog through ads in various RSS feeds!

Pretty interesting space we're in, eh?