Working for "The Man"

One of my favorite movies of the last couple years was School of Rock. I should post on that sometime. Jack Black's character in said film has a great rant about "working for the man". Which leads me to the topic of the internet and blogging and free commerce and socialism. I am of the opinion that it is far better to "be the man" then to work for him. So, as part of my blogoshphere experiment I am going to try out Google's AdSense. Who knows. I might even make 5 bucks before the end of the world as we know it. Or I might just get lucky and somehow turn this thing into some sort of avocation. If nothing else it will be funny to see exactly what AdSense does with my content.

Perhaps you are wondering how AdSense works... well, basically Google takes content and tries to deliver ads that are somehow related contextually. So if I were to blog about, say, Jack Black and the School of Rock, it would perhaps show an ad for Jack's latest film. If I were to blog about my creaky back then maybe there would be an ad from some chiropractor, or maybe healing herbs or something. So then the idea is that you, dear reader, feel compelled to check out that herbal remedy for every known human ailment, and click on the ad. If and when that happens I suppose Google pays me a half a cent or something for facilitating your healing.

So the question is this... am I "working for the man" by agreeing to include AdSense on my site? Or am I sticking it to the man? Or am I sticking it to you... the poor reader... and therefore I am the man? Maybe all of the above. But as long as no one gets hurt and I am one half-cent richer is it really so terrible? And what about poor blogger.com? How do they ever make any money providing me this space on the web and nifty tool to share my thoughts and feelings? I suppose they get some piece of the Google action. Somebody has to pay for all this bandwidth, right? Ultimately every body has to eat, and I have no problem with commerce. Google's motto is "do no harm". Well, we will see about that I guess.

Some parting thoughts....

1) Hyperlinks in my content are just there for the readers pleasure and my amusement. They have nothing to do with AdSense and I don't make any money off those links (I'll have to look into that though - heh).

2) The ads that are at the top of my blog are placed there by Google and I have no control over them. Google did make me sign an agreement which included a promise that I would not place pornographic material on my site, so I hopefully can assume that Google has certain standards and the ads won't be terribly offensive. If they are offensive to you, sorry.

3) This is an experiment. So your comments are welcome.