One ramification of the growth of technology is that sites may start out free, but then they have to make more of a profit, so what started as a free, quality site becomes an ad-ridden nightmare.

A recent example is MyBlogSite. It began as a terrific site for hosting blogs. It had all the features I wanted, and it was free. Then suddenly (this Tuesday, to be exact), they turned commercial. There was a big banner ad squeezed into a “control panel” which the program wouldn’t let me move out of the side column. Of course, a column is meant to be narrow, and a banner ad is meant to be wide, so when it came to competition for screen space between the sidebar and the text of the blog articles, guess which one lost! My blog posts were suddenly about 25% of the screen width. But at least there was a nifty banner ad! Yippee!!

(I have, indeed, searched the Internet and there are quite a few other people abandoning MyBlogSite because of the banner ad / “blog control panel” issue.)

Even better was the one banner ad in their cycle that actually forced a popup ad on top of it all! So depending which ad you got, you might also get an extra ad FOR FREE!! Usually about some aquarium-style screensaver. Which you can ALSO get for free!! :-\

The third thing that showed up on Tuesday was a new form of advertising, where select keywords from within the blog posts would become highlighted (in nice, attractive, bright green) and would link to a sponsored ad. Now this was getting totally invasive! I’ve got a post for my library patrons to read about finding newspaper articles, and a couple of words are now links to sponsored ads! You mouseover them and you get a nice big (semitransparent) box that says it’s a sponsored ad and gives you an abstract from the linked site. Click to actually go there. What was the weirdest thing was looking at my CALENDAR (of all things), and seeing the “Sun” label (yes, for Sunday) made a hotlink to a sponsored ad for Sun Microsystems or some such. That was totally the straw that broke the blogcamel’s back!

(It appears there may have been so much negative fallout from their green adwordlinks that MyBlogSite may actually have removed that function. I’m not finding it now. But either way, “it’s too late baby, now it’s too late!”)

As of today, we have moved our blog to an in-house site, hosted on our own servers, with NO ADS! We (the library) a’re the first ones using the software (called CommunityServer), so we’re still working out the bugs. For instance, I want anyone to be able to visit our blog site, and right not you have to log in with your Butler University ID. But it’s in house and fixable. And we’re not reliant on the whims of a web host that has to make (continually more?) money.

This trend seems to be permeating much of the online world. So far, I’m glad that at least Google has chosen a rather non-invasive way of advertising. And even then, the ads you do see are RELATED to what you’re viewing! If you’ve got to have ads on your pages, at least they can be just to one side and be relevant to your content. That helps everyone!

Unfortunately, at the ILF conference I spoke at on Friday, I recommended MyBlogSite as an excellent option for starting a free blog. Then 4 days later it all changes! I wish I could go back and change my referral for those 70+ librarians who were listening. I guess Blogger is still the best free blogging site out there. TypePad is pretty good, too.