Your mileage may vary

1. Bathroom safety bars are already installed
2. Your share of the rent is negligible because the mortgage is paid off
3. They admire you for knowing how to work all the remote controls
4. Dad does all of your laundry. “Hey, I ain’t doin’ anything else. I might as well do my share.”
5. Mombo is in bed by 6:30. Dad stays up ’til eight thirty
6. You can use their car mostly anytime, as long as you drive them to the doctors, WallMart, or Pik N Save
7. Somebody’s always home to answer the door.
8. When you fall off your knee walker in the garden, there’s someone to root you on as you struggle to your feet.
9. The freezer’s always full
10. There’s always pie!

I just discovered HOBO’s. Great discount high end home improvement and decorating stuff.

Reminds me of Tuesday Morning Store http://www.tuesdaymorning.com/

Bought some planters and put Pansies in them.

Here’s their online store: HOBOonline.com.

Well, I think so . . . but not everybody agrees with that.

I offered a webpreneur my considered advice about the nature of his business model last week. No, actually what I did was send a pissy email to a large reality show composite site:

Subject: Too many pop-ups + audio ads. I won’t be back.

Bad business model. You’re driving away people like me.

Not touchy-feely constructive criticism, but this web site creeped me out. It threw two full page pop-under ads plus a disembodied voice (asking  me if  wanted a free iPod) before I even got to the main page.

Honestly, I was just killing time Googling American Idol’s Adam Lambert, so my expectations weren’t high.  Realitytvworld.com? Reality-tv-online.com? Realitynewslive.com? Realitynewsonline.com? Ok. Pick one. <click> OMG! Popups!

So, I e-mailed my thoughts, and Mr. Let’s-keep-him-anonymous-so-I-don’t-get-sued told me what he thought:

What would you prefer as a business model? Providing content for free without having ads for any income? Just curious…

A valid enough point in today’s ad-based content provider environment. I decided to continue offering my unsolicited, but oh, so wise and valuable opinion to Mr. LKHASIDGS. To wit:

Well, since you asked—You allow audio ads (mine offered me a free ipod). Horribly intrusive and a little bit scary. Bad idea. it makes you look like you just don’t care. Then I had two pop-under screens try to open, for a total of three intrusions before I even got to your site. The pop-unders were especially worrysome, since I use Adblock Plus Firefox Add-on. Only one actually loaded (from Tribalfusion), the other showed a blank screen. I then spent time rechecking my security settings, thinking maybe some adware or browser hijacker was involved.

By the time I actually viewed your site, I was over it. I’m a big reality show fan, and your site looked interesting, and I may have clicked around a bit more IF I wasn’t nervous about what other surprises you may pop my way.

I get trying to make money through advertisers, but you don’t pay your writers (and believe me it shows), and you’ve got ads on every other inch of your site. That gives the impression that you aren’t about content—you’re about a low overhead, low maintenance site designed to make money by pushing ads. I don’t see it as a long-term business model—or at least I hope it’s not. I’m so tired of web entrepreneurs playing chicken with the dark side.

Good luck.
Annie Alpert