Dirty blogs

This shouldn't really come as a surprise, but I enjoy blogging. I enjoy writing blogs and I really enjoy reading the blogs of others. When I have the time, I enjoy surfing random blogs using such services as Blog Explosion or BlogMad. I also avail myself of the traffic generating features of those services as well, but to be quite honest, that matters less to me than it used to. For those unfamiliar with those services, you surf the blogs of people who have signed up and earn credits for each page you view. These credits, in turn, can be used to get your blogs to show up in the rotation of blogs being viewed. Each service has a "ticker" that forces you to view a blog for a certain amount of time (ranging from 20-30 seconds in the sites I have used) before you can move on to the next blog if you want to earn credit for viewing that blog. And so, often, I will open multiple tabs in Maxthon and be surfing multiple blogs at the same time. In doing so, I have been fortunate enough to come across some really great blogs. But I have also noticed something. There are a lot of dirty blogs out there in the blogosphere. And by dirty I don't mean vulgar, profane, pornographic (I am sure there are plenty of those, but I choose to have my surfing settings avoid those ones). By dirty I mean cluttered, busy, confusing. It is astounding the number of blogs I have surfed to that have a grimy layer of ads, links, banners, buttons, and just general garbage before I ever even get an entry. If I can't see a decent portion of the blogger's most recent entry without having to scroll my browser window, I refuse to even look at the blog. And it isn't as if I have a little browser window. I don't have it maximized, but since I run my resolution at 1600x1200, my browser window is usually around 1280x960. In other words, my browser window is plenty large. I know that there are ways to "make money" from your blog (I put that in parentheses because, really, how much money do you think individuals really make from their blogs?). I also know it is fun to have lots of little gizmos and gadgets in your sidebar (heck, I have a cool little Flickr badge with some fun photos here in this blog). But when they become this huge monstrosity, filled with maps, buttons of all sorts of different sites, photos, playlists, friends, archives, links, etc. I just stop looking. For me, the joy of blogging (and reading blogs) is getting to read the thoughts, ideas, and works of other people who I wouldn't get to read otherwise. But when those thoughts get buried under a barrage of AdSense ads, banners and links, the effort and frustration to find them often outweighs the payoff. Or maybe I am just lazy. ;)