Why This is an Ad-Free Blog

"I met a man who advises companies on how to be more efficient. He asked me what steps I had taken to ‘monetise my brand.’ I should have told him that a ladies’ brand is her own affair, but instead I explained that monetise is not a word and that there is more to life than the bottom line. He didn’t speak to me again – hooray."

(Jeanette Winterson)

When I click on to the option to "customize" my blog, I have four tabbed options. Posting, Settings, Layout (so far, so useful...) and Monetise. I do not wish to monetise my blog. Had I not read Jeannette Winterson's comments on the term in one of her columns last year, I would not even have recognised the word. Yet now everyone who sets up a blog with blogger is being encouraged to "monetise" . This means that if you sign up for this option, Google shows targetted ads based on your blog's content and you earn money when visitors view or click on these ads. (As a googlemail user, I'm unfortunately familiar with how this targeting works in practice. For example, I get an email from a friend that mentions fat activism and an ad appears alongside my inbox encouraging me to find out the "5 tips to get rid of belly fat".)

I first became aware of the explicitly ad-free blog movement whilst reading The Wish Jar, blog of author and guerilla artist Keri Smith. She sets her blog as a clear space that advertising cannot inhabit, and designed a logo to express this. This is where my owl ad-free blog logo comes from, and you can find more about what it means, and read Keri Smith's FAQ on why it matters to her, and download it for your own use by clicking here.

I manage to avoid a lot of advertising in my day to day life. I don't have a TV, and I have a clever application called Add-Art installed on my computer that replaces almost all the ads I would see online with pieces of art, and I rarely read magazines. A quick search online suggests that the average person in the western world is exposed to anywhere between 200 and 3000 adverts a day. Whilst I see adverts on billboards, and when I read the Saturday paper, I'm by no means bombarded with them to that extent. And I don't miss them, these adverts. And I certainly don't want to subject readers of my blog to them.

Welcome to a small ad-free pocket of the internet.

Regeneration

At a party this weekend, a friend was telling me about woodland management, which is something I knew nothing about. He was telling me there is more to it than simply cutting down trees. I'd always thought that our need for wood had to be an endless compromise, with the trees always losing; we've decided that whatever we need the wood for is more important than having a living, breathing tree, and that decision is final. I'd always thought that a tree grows, and gets cut down, and then that's it.

What I hadn't appreciated is that trees grow back. Even if you cut the tree down to a stump, almost to ground level, it will send out shoots that will grow into new trunks, and in the meantime the space you have made allows the light to get through to give everything else growing in the woodland a better chance to get big and strong.

This initially sounded like magic to me - self-regenerating trees - but the fact that all it takes for trees to do this (species permitting) is a little care and planning , that you can manage a woodland so that it can keep providing you with a source of wood but at the same time still be a functioning part of its ecosystem, that cutting down the tree to make something doesn't need to be the end, that if you treat it well the tree will keep providing for you and those who come after you, all this made me really excited. A woodland can be sustainable if we just allow it to be so.

Introduction

Part of my reason for starting this blog was the realisation that all the time that I used to spend writing zines, I now spend on social networking sites. Instead of creating something personal and lasting, I was consuming the impersonal, ephemeral offerings of my hundred odd 'friends', which ultimately left me hungry, and insecure that everyone else was having more fun than me. I'm theoretically more connected to everyone I've ever met than ever before, but somehow I'm lonelier than I have ever been, and I think the two are connected.

A blog seemed a good middle ground between social networking sites and zines. A halfway point for me to rest at before I complete the journey back to where I began, whilst still keeping the instant gratification of the internet I have grown so fond of.

After I had named this blog, I realised the title could be read in two ways:

1. The first, and intended, reading was that of trying to figure out what remains when all the other things have been taken away. Looking for the things that remain constant when it feels like everything is changing, trying to pin down what is left behind when everything else has gone:

All that's left behind = All that remains, the things that are still here.

2. The second reading, which I saw later, is as a statement, an announcement, almost said with relief. It's close to the opposite of what I was initially trying to encapsulate:

All that's left behind = All of those things are behind me now. They have all gone.

When those two interpretations of the phrase are added together; all the things I have kept and all the things I have let go of, they make a whole.

"All That's Left Behind" is about everything that has been lost, but also everything that is still here.

(It's also a line from "Invisible Man" by the Breeders.)