You may have noticed our Blogad strip over on the left there has been slowly but surely growing. Blogads is a noble, patient experiment by the stalwart, ever pleasant Henry Copeland, and it's a damn good one.

If you are a blogger or read blogs, put your money where your heart is and get with the program: Blogads are very reasonably priced, get a lot of motivated, educated eyeballs, and is run very professionally. I can't even get it together to remember my password to approve new ads, and Henry just smiles (I assume, since I can't see the dude) and does it for me - very indulgent. If you have a site, earn a few bucks the old-fashioned way - advertising - and defray your server costs, or buy some extra freedom fries or whatever. Give Henry a shout.

Henry also keeps a Blogad-related blog:

[quoting Lileks] "The real news of the day, as it pertains to the lives of the people who bought the papers, were the ads." That's a beautiful and almost-always-overlooked thought. Ads tell a vital story, narrating and nurturing our material life.

These vacuous banners and buttons we spend our todays avoiding don't tell a story, they don't engage. And they won't last.

If you are buying Blogads, please feel free to upload an image, but please don't forget to use some words too. Tell a story. Have some fun. And we'll keep your ad for Lileks' granddaughter to chuckle over.

Advertising is where culture meets the individual on the most personal level, and ads tell as much about the status of a culture at a given point in time as well as anything, hence the importance that they be preserved. "Commercialization" isn't necessarily a dirty word.