Why I click on my own ads.

It's like The Onion, with tea and crumpets.

The Tiffin Times:

"Government wins vote enabling them to “make people scared to commit acts of terror”

Plan to fight terror with horrifyingly repressive legislation meets with mixed reception

By Eleanor Childress

Human rights campaigners have reacted with dismay to the success of the Government bill allowing the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days without charge. The bill, which was passed in a Commons vote thanks to last-minute support from the Democratic Unionist party, doubles the length of time the police are allowed to detain suspected terrorists for. However, a spokesperson for the Home Office insisted that the extra time the bill would allow the police was a crucial factor in the war on terror:

“Yes, we only needed two weeks back when we were dealing with the IRA, but al Qaida is a lot more sophisticated. According to the official Home Office Level of Terror Swatch (pictured), which we are issuing all senior police officers with, they are generally positioned somewhere between ‘pernicious’ and ‘insidious‘. IRA suspects tended to be inherently Catholic and thus prone to confessing anyway after a few drinks”

Believe it or not, Google Adwords has a policy that states that you may not click on ads displayed on your own site. Which would be fine, if you got a say in what appeared. You don't.

Me, I like knowing what is attached to my blog, even temporarily, so I use services that don't do that to me. Project Wonderful gives me a whole list every morning of things people think my readers (and therefore this writer) will be interested in.

I'm lazy. I appreciate things that come to me, especially when they beg prettily and offer to pay me for my time and attention. Nice advertiser. Pat Pat Pat.

And when they are particularly nice, or particularly apt, or if I find myself weeping with laughter - I tend to hang a post on it. It's not pandering, I do that to any link that does that to me. And already, I've found several web-comics and other sites it would never have occurred to me to look for and which I would never have stumbled across in my usual daily patterns.

By the by, I've found I'm not the only one who seems to use Project Wonderful this way. I will often put together a little ad and scattershot it across the membership. Often there are empty slots that will be filled with a bid of zero cents! This way, I find people who would not ordinarily read my blog, and it's a great way to build a readership base.

Me, I'd prefer running a freebie to the default "your ad here" appearing, so it's good for me as an advertiser as well.