cashing the check

Apropos of changing the subject, I got an email asking would it be possible to advertise in one of your blog posts? and offering a hundred bucks if I put a particular link in a post, obviously for SEO reasons.

I feel like it would be gross to not take the money. It’s the same question as whether you pick up a penny on the floor. Maybe I don’t even want pennies, maybe the trouble to bend down is worth more than the penny. I try to always take the penny, under the theory that it’s disrespectful to people who really need a penny if I leave it there.

Years ago I took money for mentioning a company in blog posts on gonze.com. Some friends tolerated this, some must have moved on. It is weird to do to people in a personal blog, like signing on to a pyramid scheme that requires you to turn your friends into zombie suckers just like yourself, except at your profit and their expense.

I remember offering to buy a drink for the cyber celebrities Lawrence Lessig and Tim O’Reilly, who I had run into at the bar at a conference. They took it as offering to buy dinner. I guess people often do that for them because they’re celebrities. They took me up on the perceived offer and by the time I figured out what they thought I was too embarrassed to correct them, maybe because of their celebrityhood. They must have seen that offer the way I see this one.

A tip for life: when somebody writes you a check, cash it. So I put the link in, along with a little blurb about the money stuff. (That blurb is how this post started). Also I named the logo image on my site thesefolksgavemeahundredbuckstoputthishere.png. And the guy didn’t dig it.

So I moved the blurb out to this post. But the dude still didn’t dig the image name, and he didn’t like that I prefaced the link with here’s a link that will earn me a few bucks in exchange for some SEO juice. So I said forget it and gave the money back to make him go away. Easy come, easy go.