She’s skeptical about advertising-supported social networking sites, and wrote a multipart essay last year walking through the problems with it (the essay was originally posted to her Live Journal account, but has been moved to Dreamwidth.)

The primary problem she argues, is diminishing returns on ads, resulting in lower prices, and lower prices requiring replacing more editorial content on the page with ads. The reason why there’s a diminishing return for ads on a social networking site: people come there to communicate, not shop. Unless you have the capability (like Facebook) to place a narrowly targeted ad with a high likelihood of getting some sort of conversion into sales or action, then trying to fund your site through ads will not succeed.

That skepticism, and Live Journal’s switch to an advertising-supported model, spurred her to take a branch of the open source Live Journal code, and start Dreamwidth.

Dreamwidth supports itself through a paid accounts system. Users pay as little as USD5 a month up to USD50 a year.

Disclaimer: I am a charter subscriber to Dreamwidth with a lifetime account. If you’d like to try it, please comment on this post. I have a small number of free invite accounts I can share.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to set all the opt-out cookies from that interface, so I had to go to some of the individual advertising networks’ opt-out interface.

On BlueKai’s website, I was rewarded with this bit of passive agressiveness:

Yes, by opting out of tracking, I’m going to prevent a charitable contribution.

And if you’re from BlueKai, or their PR firm, don’t bother commenting to try to defend yourselves, because there really is no defense for that. Thank you for letting people opt out of your tracking, but your business isn’t saving babies, it’s ads and marketing data.

It’s staggering to realize all the cultural messages dropped on women. Do advertisers really only see women as “pre-dieting”? Come on Facebook, you can do better. It’s not hard.

But it’s worse than it appears. If you set your profile to genderless, it still hectors you to tell them your gender. I guess they have a lot of diet banner ads they need to display.

U.S. Non-Parisian Research Council

Further on in the spam they spelled “non-partisan” correctly, but had to laugh at the unintentional jingoism.

So a piece of advice: if you spam people trying to sell a piece of anti-Semitic garbage, you might lose them as customers.

I’ve heard the same complaints about Amazon and Borders. I know a few people who write for a living, and they love Amazon and Borders. Because in rural East Texas there is only one place to shop: WalMart. And the only book you will find at WalMart is something on the order of Bill O’Reilly inciting the mob to throw non-Republicans in the furnaces. And before that, well, maybe your little hamlet had a library.

But even in the sticks, people have Internet access, and while Jeff Bezos will sell you Ann Coulter’s Kill All the F*ck*ng Liberals, he’ll also sell you The Left Hand of Darkness and other fine books.

I’m lucky and have an independent bookstore two blocks from my place. If you live in the ‘burbs, then if you’re lucky you will have a Borders. However, the Indie bookstore with the Booksense 76 shelf also features the same, nasty Right Winger books you’ll find at WalMart and Borders, because they sell, and the bookseller would like to stay in business.

But other than DVDs and the occasional PS2 game, that’s the only thing the TV’s used for.

Chuq mentioned this on the public Apple web development list.

And yes, if you follow AOL’s rules, you can get on their commercial email white list.

Watching other folk’s comments feeds for this sort of thing might be a useful way to detect attacks.

So, when the kids at Slashdot suggest drastic measures (oh look, Mac OS comes with this tool…) it’s hard not to, well, do your part for the Internet by stress testing the server selling patent medicines.

I think Jay, and the folks in Teresa’s comments section deserve the Hero of Blogistan with Anti-Spam Clusters for their work.

So, since Pat Robertson can get away with suggesting that someone ought to bomb the State Department, and Ann Coulter can giggle about Tim McVeigh killing editors with whom she disagrees, we Netizens ought to get away with suggesting that someone ought to garrote spammers and the DMA executive board. No, wait, rule 103.5343.a says: Only Conservatives can get away with encouraging the murder of their opponents. There is an exemption for Stalinists, but only in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc. Well, you knew the game was rigged.