I agree with Chuq Von Rospach. Sites shouldn’t be forced to take advertising, even to give that money to a charity.

I don’t take advertising here, well, except if you count my Amazon link and my occassional mentioning of Seagate, which sponsors my video show.

Anyway, there’s a cost to advertising in clutter, in extra bits that the infrastructure needs to push out, and in reduced quality of experiences for users.

And, it’s a smart piece of business on the part of Craig’s List to try to be different. You get audiences that way. There’s other ways to make money from audiences than just putting a few ads on your site.

I’m very loyal to Craig’s List, cause he got me my job at NEC, which led to getting a job at Microsoft.

OK, this is weird. So I was in the Mercury News today and my first girlfriend from back at Prospect High School says she read that, wondered if I was the guy she hung around in High School, Googled me, confirmed that I was the Robert Scoble she remembered, and wrote me.

I haven’t seen her since 1983.

Even better, she’s director of marketing at a tech company.

Thanks to Mike Cassidy and Google. What a weird world we live in.

I interviewed the StumbleUpon team today. I hadn’t used it before today (sorry, I can’t try every cool thing that comes through my Link Blog).

But it rocks. It brings you cool Web sites that other people have rated. The service is very hot (about 1.5 million users already). Whew.