Imagine me slouching in an

Imagine me slouching in an tan pleather sofa, feet propped up on an old three-legged stool, six-pack o' Budweiser on one site, doting wife on the other, a moist towel across my forehead, tongue lolling out to the site and an exclamation point hovering animatedly over my head. Caption: What a day!

Computers will be the end of me. Everywhere Joe Bob went today, he was attacked by the logical almost methodical ruthlessness that is the inanimate and untouchable world of zeroes and ones.

But we won't talk about that.

I'm trying to make money (what else is new). Enough money to get to do what I think I do best: not work, but rather, create. Not for the 'Zon, as some silly people like to call it, but for the good of mankind. But first...

Did you know there's a new feature at amazon that lets you create buying guides? Check out the 'orribly named "So You'd Like To..." (requires a log in). It's a new way to create pages like, "So you'd like to... Host a Cocktail Party!" and "So you'd like to ... Be an Old School Goth!". The neat thing about it is that it has it's own markup language so that you can put something like <ASIN: B00003IRC3> into the form and it'll turn it into that item's title, with a link to the product. Overall, I don't have much faith in the feature, since it requires you to go around the site too much hunting down items, and then writing something that isn't natural (a battery-powered commercial on wheels... hmm). Anyway, I thought immediately, "Hey, someone should turn this into a weblog." But that's probably just me.

Nervous Text Ads
So I built my own version of what Matt Haughey and Evan Williams of Metafilter and Blogger, respectively, recently invented (or at least implemented in a useable fashion). Now, you can create ads on nervousness, seattlestories, and mockerybird, to advertise your own website.

The reason? Well, first, it seemed easy. Second, it seemed like an area without many people innovating, and yet something that would become more important in the next couple years. Third, it seemed fun. Fourth, I didn't want to get left out. Fifth, being in an arena with Matt and Evan is a good challenge for me, they're not dumb people by any means, and I am. So, subtract a day and a half from the life of Erik Benson, and voila Nervous Text Ads are born.

Why choose my ads over the others? No reason. I know that Matt and Evan are both excellent programmers and that they will continue to innovate and force me to keep up with them. For now, I have the slight disadvantage because their audience is much larger than mine. So of course more people will use them. The slight advantage is that I'm wily, and can slide through slick situations, and have been known to survive a beating or two. Also, my ads are already ready to be put onto other people's websites. Hey, speaking of witches, do you want to volunteer a corner of your webpage and make some money (probably not that much at this point, depending on traffic your site gets) in the process? All it takes is one line of javascript. Email me if you're interested. We could be famous together.

Ads, shmads. Let's talk war. Did you know that my co-worker's highschool friend's brother knows Osama bin Laden? It's true. Now, you are only 5 degrees of separation removed from the most wanted man on the planet.

What do you think of ginger, aka segway (site is a little slow, probably overloaded)? Oh, nevermind, I don't want to know.

Okay, go buy a text ad now, and help me out. Buy one for a friend, buy one for a relative. Get your Christmas shopping done early, buy a Nervous Text Ad today! Etc. Or email me and tell me how much you hate it. I like hatemail too.