Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

Seattle at Night,
originally uploaded by philoking.

This isn’t very techy, but Dawn and I went out to take some photos of the city and I thought this one came out very well. To say the least, our new city is beautiful.

I have almost written this post so many times. I was hesitant for several reasons. The first being I didn’t want to insult anyone in the gay or lesbian community. The second is I didn’t want to talk bad about Google Adsense since they pay me.

Here is the rub. For the thousandth time I have gotten an ad for gay or lesbian websites on my website. Philoking.com is a tech blog. I write about computers, operating systems, software, consumer electronics, blogging and the like. It’s just not an appropriate ad that I want displayed on my website.

I go through the motions, block the site and after a few hours the ads go away. The question is, what about my content makes Google think that those are the kinds of ads that I want on my website.

I hope that they take some stock in their algorithm, look at the sites that we block, and try to intelligently block similar sites for me.

I am have been looking into other ad publishers for some time now given the major discrepancy between credited clicks and the logs my servers show for outgoing clicks, but this reason gives me renewed reasons to quickly look for an alternative. Hopefully Microsoft will open it’s ad serving program to less major sites and I can use that.

This has been a big week, lots of thinking, coordinating, and ultimately making life changing decisions. Yesterday I signed and accepted an offer to join the Microsoft team working with Business Intelligence products. I will be starting there on December 31st and could not be more excited to do so.

I don’t really have any more details that I can discuss at the moment. I just wanted to get the disclosure out of the way.

One of the things I try to maintain here is the theme that you can be productive on any operating system. Joining the Microsoft team won’t change that way of thinking and my blog format will be the same.

I look forward to all that I will learn and accomplish there and can only imagine how that knowledge will transfer to make my blog even better in the future.

Thanks and keep reading!

JB