Its pretty weird just how close your idea is to ours, im afraid we never published our thoughts though…

Would love to talk more about it so if interested do drop me an email, it’s s cracking idea!

Anyway, they are pretty cool at Google, and let you choose not to have them display as well as giving you some sort of control, over what sort of categories that YOU allow to be displayed. Advertising in your e-face with a bit of conscious, that’s always nice. (Wonder how long this will last???)

Back to BAN, however! (“B.A.N. Your blog ONTO the best most effective sites and blogs out there”.)

What if instead of thinking of this concept in terms of a one to many vehicle: one company that starts up and provides the widgets, plugins, addons, fill in the name your system uses, tools, explanations, etc, and collects the fees, what about this?

What if the focus of this idea is the creation of a new Open Source standard using Open Source tools, and does it in a true networked community 2.0 sort of way? While not being too well versed in phpAdsNew, I’ve poked and prodded enough to know that for free OS software, it is an amazing ad serving program that you can set up on your own server, create and maintain pretty complicated campaigns for banner, badge, text and other sorts of advertising.

Update Alert! Just checked on their actual name. I was wrong :O they have now become, http://www.openads.org/, and you can bet I’m already downloading them to get their latest.

The point here is that if perhaps there were centralized installs of this or similar/compatible ad tracking servers/services that we could all get an account on (using our http://openid.net/ I hope) then just how hard could it be to set up a community based interface that allowed me, after signing up and verifying to some degree who I am and the blog I own (again, openid.net?) I am faced with a series of questions and selections about what I am doing online, blog or site-wise. Hey, maybe this is powered by the ChoicEngine we started talking about earlier! (Nice tie in, eh Steve? Hey did you get my correct address for check mailing? Kidding, I kid, I really do )

So, finally I’ve gotten the basis of a profile completed, and am given code that I can include into my pages or simple pre-affiliate number prepared/coded widgets that I can insert and I am off.

I like the idea of trying to work this concept into the actual feeds themselves, but honestly only have the 5000 foot overview on how the technology itself works. I can explain it to my Mom and she gets it, but we are going to have to recruit a Feed expert to help us with the insertion part of the equation. Hey, anyone friends with anyone over at Feedburner.com? Might be worth seeing how philanthropic they are feeling now days!

Just my thoughts after 20 hours of coding and trouble shooting and a day down in Napa helping a friend “research” (no, dude, really, I hardly had any…)

James

However, I believe they’ve abandoned this post-acquisition. Interestingly, their business model was for every display on your blog you get 1/2 a display on another blog. Therefore, in the example in this post if your blog got 5 readers a day – then you would get 2.5 displays on another blog. The other 2.5 displays could then be used for advertising.

I actually am more interested in seeing this done within an RSS feed than within a blog html page, but … Also, it seems like some action (I would argue subscribe) is more effective than simply displaying.

However, its clear we are just in the first inning of a long game figuring out the most effective ways to monetize blogs.

- Sean