Ads are not something I would normally gravitate to. They’re usually ugly, irritating or simply get in the way of the content I’m actually going to a website to locate or explore. So until recently, any serious thoughts of putting them on my own site was extremely foreign.

To date I haven’t put any measureable amount of consideration into somehow financing the ongoing costs of hosting, domains and server management, but a recent invitation by the lovely folks at Carbon Ads to join their ad network piqued my interest.

I knew who they were — I’d seen their ads on sites I frequent and so immediately knew there was an opportunity for a good fit. I also knew enough about their angle — one single small, non-animated ad per page, allowing more than a sufficient degree of flexibility with regards to layout and integration. So I said “yes” and have been happily running these ads on the site for a few days now.

The beauty is that the ads are largely for products and services I would likely, or already use and endorse, meaning there’s no guilt. It’s an experiment on one hand, but one with no real downside. And there’s an oppotunity to learn — from the ads themselves, but also by clicking through to see where they take you.

My expectation at this point is minimal, though (obvously) the long-term goal is to increase traffic and impressions by writing more — to share ideas and opinions that I’ve largely kept to myself or saved for a more private dialogue with my close peers and colleagues. To that end, the queue of half-finished ideas, articles that have been building up should start to creep out a little more frequently.

Aside from any potential monetary benefit, however small, this opportunity with Carbon Ads has also lit a small fire under plans that have been smouldering for a while now — to finally leave Movable Type behind and move to a new publishing platform (no, not Tumblr or Wordpress) with a refreshed design that better reflects where I am professionaly across the board.

There really isn’t just one true source for personal publishing anymore, be it on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious (yes, still) and to that end, the initial work on aggregating these and other sources into a unified whole has been started though likely won’t come to the light until I finish up one last major undertaking.