I'm intrigued by the process of blogging just as much as the actual writing of the blog posts themselves: how people come into contact with a blog, how they interact with the blog, how a blog becomes established and recognized by the internet community -- that kind of stuff. It's really interesting stuff, once you start looking into the statistics and noticing what kind of internet traffic comes your direction.

For whatever reason, the volume of visitors to this blog has tailed off in recent weeks. For a while, basically between the American holiday of Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, I was getting hundreds of random hits per day: just some scattered search engine query bringing someone in for a quick bounce in-and-out (curiously often related to "appeltaart," "Fonz" or "dating in Amsterdam," and more through image searching than through text searching). But recently, the flood of random hits has slowed significantly (again, don't ask me why)... And now, I find myself getting more e-mail reaction to particular posts -- sometimes from quite a long time ago.

For instance, a number of international expatriates from Richland County, Ohio found my blog through my post on absentee voting, which included an incidental mention of the race for Member of State Central Committee, Mansfield (19th District). And while these visitors didn't typically leave comments on the blog for everyone to see, I got to have some interesting e-mail interaction with a unique sub-culture of people scattered throughout the world.

And then there've been the requests for advertising space. Like the following e-mail received last week:

Hello,

dead monkeys in a party dress? now i've seen it all.

Say, I was wondering if I can place an ad on this page http://www.ericasp.com/blog.php/2008/01/22/dead_monkey_in_a_party_dress
for someone who sells pet insurance?

I don't have much, but I can pay $25 for an ad there. If this works for you let me know and I'll send you over the ad and the payment.

Thanks,

A.K.

I honestly don't know how much of this is spam, and how much is legitimate business entrepreneurialship. I'm not naive -- still, I can imagine that some small business would do a search on Google, see what it came up with, and then try to place ads on those sites that already have some exposure (as opposed to making their own site and then waiting for it to rise the ranks of the search engine robots).

I'd be curious to hear if anyone has any experience (positive or negative) with advertising opportunities in the context of blogging. Up to this point, I've been fairly averse to the idea... But then again, maybe I'm just scared of the unfamiliar... Who knows?