Is monetisation a dirty word?

Above: Quality advertising Bangkok style

What do you think about adverts on blogs?

I'm in two minds whether to mention this or see if someone else does...  I've been dipping my toe in Adsense for the last year - with adverts so discreet neither you or anyone else has spotted them (in the invisible space at the bottom of the right hand column.) They don't earn mega-bucks... but they could!

Here are the easiest ways to earn money from your blog (or website):

• Become an Amazon Affiliate - join up and get the codes to insert an array of Amazon ads - from hyperlinks for individual items to all-singing banners and the little search engine gismo on the top right of this blog. They pay a generous 5% commission if anyone buys through your links (and it'll soon be Christmas again folks!) but only after you reach a £30 threshold.
• Join Google Adsense - again options include anything from a line of text to full bells and whistles. You get a few pennies for certain numbers of people clicking on the ads, not just buying stuff. You can screen out ads on sensitive subjects (e.g. sex, religion, folk-dancing) or things you don't want to promote (e.g. gambling, loans, the Daily Mail). But again, you have to earn £60 before you get anything.
• If you're a member of certain other sites (eg Topcashback) they sometimes pay commission to promote their sites. Only do this if you honestly think they're ace (I do, by the way) or your credibility will be shot!

Personally, my brain edits out adverts - except those horribly distracting moving banner ones (like on this short fiction site where they jump around at the side of the story for God's sake!) - so I won't have noticed if any of you have adverts on your pages. But I've added some - still quite discreet - to test them out and may keep tweaking. I'm aiming here more at casual visitors to old posts, not regulars, but you don't get the option to only put them on old posts... not that I can find anyhoo.

Question:  've been thinking about how much I like blogging but can't justify the time spent on it (my only income is p/time £7/hr  - I make almost nothing from writing). But is it 'wrong' to do it at all? Or I could have more than one blog - one for the usual random stuff, and another, more focussed on e.g. writing which would be more monetised.

What does anyone think? *braces herself for diatribes*

Retro gismo flashback

My previous post got me thinking about having lived through the dawn of this digital age ... cue fuzzy flashback...

I was first in my class to have a calculator and when I started work (as a mere child) in the early 80s computer programs were loaded manually from reels of tape with holes in. The 'computer' was actually just a terminal linked by a modem to the bank's national computer centre. I worked there on the staff help desk after panic set in when they introduced terminals with screens!  The actual computers took whole rooms to house the sort of memory you now get in the average mobile phone.

(An avant garde friend had an early mobile phone as big as his head - and that was pretty big! When he went to the bar we'd run out to the telephone box and call him to ask for crisps.)

Our home's first remote control device was for a video recorder, but was attached by a lead! I used to carry around a cassette recorder (pictured above) before the Sony Walkman, and can vividly remember the first time I heard a CD - Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega.

Apart from a brief foray with a Commodore 64 and flirtation with an Amstrad wordprocessor, I first saw a home PC in about 1990, but as late as 1995 at the local newspaper we sent stories via an Olivetti keyboard and modem. At the printer, stories were quite literally 'cut' and 'pasted' onto mockups and the lines between them were put on manually using teeny tiny rolls of sticky tape with a line down the middle.

By 1996 I had a  PC (a 256 with 4MB memory) and an email address - but I only knew 2 other people with emails! You couldn't imagine in those days that one day you'd own something like an iPad. It is not only music player and recorder, calculator, word processor, camera, means of communication, publishing device and video player. It's also camera, movie studio, orchestra, art studio, reference library and GPS.  I've just been using Facetime (Skype for iPads) to talk to a friend working in Azerbaijan. And it used to take 6 months for a letter to reach my missionary uncle in deepest Congo but he has a satellite powered laptop now and I can wave to him on Google Earth... up to a point.

Care to share some of your 'old tech' stories - what was your most exciting new gadget in the 'old days'?

'Wherefore art thou, Romeo?' she texted.

"Heart of Darkness? I dunno - I'll just check my GPS"

Modern technology really messes with your plots.

I was reading somewhere how the end of Romeo and Juliet would have been completely different if they had just texted each other. And it made me think of other great stories that would have been different today: Jane Eyre could have come to Mr Rochester's side if she'd been following him on Facebook... or subscribed to the local newspaper's RSS feed. If Frankenstein's monster had blogged about how he felt, he'd have been hunted down by paparazzi and chat-show hosts, not irate villagers.

It isn't just the classics either - I know quite a few writers who have had to set their stories in the 80s and 90s because recent technology would bugger up the story. My own first novel - which currently resides both literally and metaphorically 'under the bed' - will always have to be set no later than the early 90s because the reclusive main character would never have to face the world if he could communicate freely by email and share documents over the internet.

So if good fiction means presenting your main character with problems to overcome, often compounded by miscommunication, misunderstanding and lack of information... does this mean modern technology is solving all our problems, clarifying our relationships and supplying us with all the answers?

I'm not sure it does, but do you think it is quietly changing the nature of the stories we tell? And how would other famous stories have panned out given access to Google, YouTube and Twitter?

First Attempts at Animation

Martin P Uppet.. movie star!

I know I said I'd be doing posts about my new iPad... but I've been too busy playing with it to write about it! The bottom line is - it's the best thing I've ever owned and if you locked me in a room for the rest of my life with one (and wifi) I'd be perfectly content. The only thing it doesn't do is make a cup of tea... although I'm sure there'll be 'an app for that' soon!

But what I will show you for now, is my first proper short film... it's only a minute long, but it's a start. I made it using my two new favourite apps - iMotion which turns the inbuilt camera into a stop-motion camera, and iMovie to add a soundtrack, effects and bring it all together.

Martin P Uppet is quite a character in our Wallasey Children's Library - he has lots of adventures with his best chum Suzanne and even has his own Facebook page. So I decided to film what happened to him while she was off...

Fifty Shades

I don't own a Kindle and, as a library assistant, will defend to the death books made out of real paper, but I did download the Kindle app so I could read eBooks by blog chums Fran and Frances.

So if I happened to buy the eBook Fifty Shades of Grey just to see what the fuss is about, at least no-one will know! Of course it's not great - it needed an editor, if only to cut out the numerous times our heroine says 'Holy crap!' - but I'll plow on for the sake of  'research' and of course I can't 'flog it' later on Amazon - a downside of Kindle I hadn't thought of!

And don't say I could have just borrowed it from the library... the waiting list is lengthier than Mr Grey's schlong and every day more furtive-looking women come in and whisper: 'I don't suppose you have...?'

If you want a flavour of the book before you 'submit' to reading it, there's a hilarious critique of the book on Cassandra Parkin's blog and I have a related idea of my own, which I'm sure you're 'gagging' to hear about... but I'm going to make you wait.

p.s. I'm about a third of the way through now, so I may be a little 'tied up' for the next few days, and have to keep you in suspense...


From my iPad