My Blog: #2 For the Flag

My mom and I share a web hosting service, and the bills get delivered to her because she has a fixed address (and I have no money). Recently, she sent me an email to tell me that we had been charged for excess traffic on our shared account. Since our account comes with 15GB per month included, that sounded absurd, and I promised to look into it. A couple weeks later when I actually did, I found that my blog had, indeed, generated over 17GB of traffic in October, almost all of it being people downloading the little American and Kazakhstani flag pictures I have on my site.

Sure enough, if you search for "American Flag" or "Kazakh Flag" on Google images, my website is number two for each of them. (Embarrassingly, both seem to be jpeg, too. Now what did I do that for?) I suppose I got "lucky" and at some early point and had my pictures show up high on the list of image results, and people are usually as happy with one flag picture as with another, so they got clicked on a lot, which reinforced Google's notion of their appropriateness, and now I am serving the two nations flags to the world.

Up till the point where we got this extra bill, the only effect of this was that I would sometimes get emails from junior high students who were doing some sort of internet project and had been told by their teachers that they had to receive permission to use any digital content downloaded from the internet. They would ask me if they could use my flag picture and I would make fun of them (or their teachers), and that was all fine.

But now that I have to pay for that bandwidth (well, for now, my mom is paying, actually, but that will change soon I think) it's less entertaining. And for a while I've been thinking I should sign up for AdSense, Google's website advertising service, to get an idea of what it's like in advance of working there. This provides a perfect excuse to do just that. So as of today, when you visit my old Peace Corps blog you will see ads on the left hand side. Right now it seems to be serving ads for flights to Kazakhstan, which is just fine with me.

I have never wanted to profit financially from my Peace Corps experience, so after defraying my mom's bandwidth bill, I will donate all the proceeds to volunteer small project grants. How am I generating the economic value behind these proceeds? Only through the Miracle of the Internet, about which I am sure to be thinking a lot in the months ahead.