Any blogger can sign up for the company's 'Kindle Publishing for Blogs' beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.

Amazon hasn't made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.

For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show "is silly," he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called "What the Buck?" for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was "only going to go so far on public access."

"But on YouTube," he said, "I've had 100 million views. It's crazy."

On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network's regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

Some of the blogs currently participating in the new program are San Francisco's SFBayStyle and Boston's Red Sox Nation. Approved sites will be able to choose the content of the CBS headlines displayed (breaking news, sports, politics), as well as select from a number of options to determine, for example, whether they want video content in the widget.

Bloggers can't just embed a widget and hope for profits, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group president Jonathan Leess told CNET News.com. "There's a screening process, obviously," he said. "We have to figure out or get some visibility into what the content is on that site, and then we screen, but we have a third party (Syndigo Networks) that administers all this for us."

CBS declined to share exact breakdowns of the revenue-distribution process. "All of it's based on certain traffic estimates from each of the sites, and (ad) placement," Leess said.

Payment is 45 days after the calendar month; payments that don't exceed $50 will roll over until they do. The contract runs one year. As far as I can tell-and I may be missing something in the fine print-members have to sign up before they are told the rev share amount.

This time around, most of the changes to the Terms and Conditions fall into two broad categories: 1) future products and features and 2) privacy requirements. Specifically, one of the main changes is that the terms anticipate future products that may become available in other advertising formats and mediums, for example Gadget Ads. As we look forward to monetizing more online and offline content, we've re-worded some portions of the terms to make them applicable across a broader array of media and formats -- anticipating, for example, that future products may be priced, paid, or managed differently than current ones.

We've also added some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers' use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.

The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google's network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.

Several other networks distribute videos and ads on the Web, but none reach as many Web sites as AdSense.

Google said it would share revenue from the ads with the creators of the videos and with the Web sites that embed them, though it declined to specify what percentage of the revenue will be kept by each party.

Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web.

iStockphoto pioneered the concept of micropayment stock imagery and was one of the first social networks in the world to actually pay contributors for the sale of their work. It remains the world leader in micropayment stock and is now the global volume leader in all stock photography sales, whether user-generated or traditional. iStock has more than 1.8 million members and an image or video is downloaded from the site every 2.5 seconds.

"Lise is a great friend, a true artist, and has really set the bar high for the members of our community," said Bruce Livingstone, CEO of iStockphoto. "We work very hard to promote our artists, providing training, business cards, partnerships, and advertising that give all our exclusive contributors maximum worldwide exposure. I believe Lise is the first of many who will achieve this milestone, as we have just barely scratched the surface of the worldwide appetite for imagery. What may be her most astounding accomplishment is that by our calculations, she just may be the most prolific stock photographer on the planet."

iStock artists are paid instantly every time one of their images is downloaded. Exclusive photographers can make 40 percent royalties on each image sold, and 50 percent on extended license agreements. iStock promotes its collection and photographers through aggressive marketing and advertising campaigns worldwide, and has many partnerships internationally that increase channel sales potential for its artists.

In recognition of her achievement, iStock is creating an iStock Wall of Fame, with Lise the first member inducted. She'll be joined by many more of the artists she has inspired during her meteoric rise.

"I love the community aspects of iStock so much and have learned a great deal from all my friends there since 2003," said Lise Gagne. "I fell in love with iStock right away, but never would have dreamt that someday it would be my career. But things have a way of working out: I got fired from my old design agency for spending too much time on iStock, and suddenly found myself with all the time in the world to give to photography. Now I hope to hit a million downloads in half the time it took to reach 500,000."

Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment. Feed readers, the applications and sites on which geeky internet users scan news items, often do not support the graphical ads which brands prefer, closing off that avenue for a broker such as Feedburner.

So, why would Google pay such a high multiple, about 10 times revenues, for the startup? Probably, for the same reason it has developed Google Analytics: it is another way for Google to tie in independent online publishers. Feedburner provides an array of services to sites, such as email newsletter publishing, and the integration of external news and photos. It is more valuable as a publishing service than an ad broker.

A recent government report forecast that robots would routinely carry out surgery by 2018.

The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

Other bodies are also thinking about the robotic future. Last year a UK government study predicted that in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings.

The European Robotics Research Network is also drawing up a set of guidelines on the use of robots.

This ethical roadmap has been assembled by researchers who believe that robotics will soon come under the same scrutiny as disciplines such as nuclear physics and Bioengineering.

A draft of the proposals said: "In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots.

"It will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems."

The issue of whether any paid content online is "better than what you can get for free" has been debated since the dawn of the Web. What arguably makes some of the top blogs better than other blogs is that, by dint of their success, they have become scoop magnets, e.g TechCrunch, Engadget. That doesn't necessarily make their reporting or analysis better, but you can always get the information there first. Of course, if they were behind a pay wall, that advantage might disappear.

That's why the Seth Godin consultant model might be more viable. Darren Rowse at Problogger, for example, offers advice to bloggers equivalent to what you might get from a paid consultant.

The argument against a paid content model for blogging begins of course with ideology - there are many blog purest who would refuse to call a paid blog a blog. Blogging, traditionally, has been about openness and inter-connectivity, which a paid subscriber wall certainly does not foster.

Most self-employed bloggers take in between $2,000 and $10,000 a month from ad sales, says Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds.com, a Web advertising concern based in Carrboro, N.C. The few that have huge audiences make significantly more, he adds. During election time, for example, a political blogger can bring in $20,000 to $30,000 a month, says Ken Layne, West Coast bureau chief for Wonkette.com, a political gossip blog owned by Gawker Media.

Self-employed bloggers set their own schedules. Writers of breaking-news blogs say 40- to 60-hour workweeks are the norm. To scoop his competitors, Mario Lavandeira, author of the celebrity-gossip blog PerezHilton.com, says he averages 19-hour workdays that start at 5:15 a.m.

CAREER PATH: Most bloggers start out using free Web sites such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com. They say it takes at least six months to build readership and clout in the blogosphere. Mr. Lavandeira advises picking an area you'll enjoy discussing for a long time because "you have to be passionate about what you're writing." A background in journalism or communications helps but usually isn't required. "I don't want to hear where candidates went to college or where else they worked," says Ryan Block, managing editor of Engadget.com, who hires most of the site's employees. "I review writing samples."

A little more than $1 billion, or one-fourth of all advertising online, went to Google's AdSense program in the third quarter of 2006. Of that, Google shared $780 million with those running AdSense. Approximately 3 million blogs now use AdSense, according to the blog-tracking site Technorati.

What isn't known is how that $780 million was distributed over those roughly 3 million blogs. But anecdotal evidence suggests that there's a majority making nothing, a sizable minority bringing in at least $100 a month, and a few making serious money.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

The audience of the YouTube website will not have to put up with overly long "pre-roll" adverts. Mr Hurley said a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet.

You won't even feel it: you tag your image, we send it to the e-commerce website that send a list of possible itens related to your image. Each image tagged gets a booBox icon over it to show your audience where to click.

Since sites will be using their own affilate codes, booBox won't be able to directly take a cut of transactions. It isn't clear if they are launching this for free, or charging for the service. Pending their position on that, as well as details on how difficult this will be to integrate with websites, I'm giving this an early thumbs up. This may be quick acquisition bait for Amazon or eBay.

How Much Does It Cost To Use The BooBoxes?
For you, nothing. We want you to earn a lot of money with your blog.

This Saturday, November 11th, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to access your account during this time, ads will still be served to your pages and we'll continue to track your earnings as normal.

While we know it will be hard to drag yourself away from your account for 4 hours, maybe this will give you a chance to clear away those cobwebs you told friends were "Halloween decorations." Take your pal Jack O. Lantern for a visit to that new neighborhood hot spot, the compost heap. When you've eradicated all the ghouls and goblins from your home, gear up for the next celebration by doing a quick search for turkey recipes (or Tofurky recipes, if you prefer).

More professional bloggers are looking at monetizing their blogs via information products according to a recent survey.

According to the survey, 42% of those surveyed plan to monetize their blogs by creating and marketing their own information products - a big jump from the 29% at the start of the year.

The survey, conducted by ePublishingDaily (this blog) and completed once in January 2006 and again in October 2006 showed a marked increase in bloggers taking a serious look at information product publishing as a viable means of monetizing their blogging efforts.

In stark contrast with these results, reliance on AdSense (and other contextual advertising programs) has fallen from 63% to 45% during the same period.

ReviewMe has a somewhat different model that PayPerPost. Where advertisers on PayPerPost set a single fee that is paid to all bloggers regardless of their size, ReviewMe uses an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics to determine the importance of a blog and charges a different fee for each blog based on the calculation. Blogger payments range from $30 - $1,000 per post.

Also, Bloggers must disclose that the review is a paid advertisement. They can do this in anyway they choose, ie "The following is a paid review:" "Paid Advertisement:" etc. This is another improvement over PayPerPost, which is heavily criticized because it does not require disclosure.

Finally, advertisers can purchase posts, but they cannot require that a post is positive. The blogger can choose to write their honest opinion without fear of not being paid. The only requirement is that the review must be a minimum of 200 words.

Here's how: every new blogger accepted into the ReviewMe network will immediately have the opportunity to earn cash by reviewing ReviewMe itself. This gives new reviewers a chance to see exactly how our system works, and helps spread the word about ReviewMe, too :-) (good or bad). This offer will be in effect until we have paid out $25,000 total for reviews.

Anyone can sign up for an account on ReviewMe. I just did, and completed the registration process with ease. Once you are finished with the sign in process you are offered the opportunity to add up to 6 blogs. Each blog is given a ranking based on an algorithm that takes in to account the sites Alexa and Technorati ranking as well as the number of subscribers to its RSS feed. The ranking then ultimately determines the price that advertisers will pay in order to have reviews placed on your site.

You, the blogger, will ultimately see 50% of the price that an advertiser pays in order to have you review their product. In my case, a review on jarkolicious will cost an advertiser $100, allowing me to pocket $50 for a few six-packs of beer, some pizza with a little pocket-change left to spare.

1. Fans: Internet readers are fickle. If they get used to reading you and then all of sudden you disappear, there are plenty of other equally entertaining blogs and columns online that they will migrate to, soon forgetting about the enjoyment you used to give...
2. Income: ...and once the fans are gone, don't expect advertising revenue to get any higher. If you're paying the bills with Google Ads, you'd better keep posting.

The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post were polarized into those violently for and those againt the product. The key area of controversy is the fact that advertisers can mandate that posts be positive on the product, and disclosure of payment is optional for the blogger (screen shot at end of post shows sample available writing opportunities).

The controversy didn't stop venture capitalists from quickly jumping on board, though. On Tuesday PayPerPost will announce a $3 million round of financing led by Inflexion Partners and with participation from Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Dan Rua from Inflexion and Michael Barach from Villiage Ventures will take board seats. Josh Stein from Draper Fisher Jurvetson will become a board observer.

Some say technology is rendering traditional painting obsolete. But Artist Gautam Rao still paints the old-fashioned way: with paint and brush on canvas. However, his subject matter is a little less traditional: He PAINTS THE COMPUTER AND GADGETS on his desk, such as his iPod, his Mac screen and closeups of icons. He even did a self-portrait (his image as it appears on his web cam). And then he BLOGS the lot and sells them on eBay.

Clicks believed by advertisers to be fraudulent: 14.6 percent

Money paid by advertisers for bogus clicks: $800 million (2005)

Advertisers who said they were victims of click fraud: 75 percent

Advertisers who said they reduced click-based advertising or plan to: 37 percent

Revenue lost by Google, Yahoo and other Web sites, as a result: $500 million

Advertisers who request refunds because of fraud: 7 percent

Average refund: $9,507

"Pay per click is a really rudimentary advertising -- a baby step -- and it's destined to decline and be replaced by other advertising methods," Richard said.

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their "opportunity," specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they'll pay only for positive mentions. Bloggers who abide by the rules get paid; heavily trafficked blogs may command premium rates. Those seeking to subvert PayPerPost from within can't: No pornographic or "illicit" content is accepted.

Murphy's approach used to be more ad hoc. He made invitations through e-mail via the BlogStar Network, which he started in 2004. BlogStar paid nicely -- a flat fee of $5 or $10 per post. "Easy money...go buy a burger or something," advised a BlogStar invitation from 2005 soliciting posts about cable network TNT's basketball commercials featuring HBO character Ali G. That come-on also told bloggers "we definitely appreciate more positive posts."

A move towards CPA (Cost Per Action) ads could deliver a hurting to Adsense publishers. CPA ads are very attractive to advertisers because they lower their cost of acquisition for leads or sales. However, there's a big flaw inherent in this type of set up: it's not always the publishers fault that the end user doesn't convert on the advertiser's end.

In fact, a lousy landing page ensures low conversions, which means publishers will be punished for an inept marketer's miscues.

Worse yet, there's a double sting from this. Not only do you reward crappy marketers for bad landing pages by discounting the price they pay, but you also punish excellent publishers by discounting the amount you pay them for traffic on their website. No way is this the direction Google should take the whole program in. In fact, this could be so bad for publishers that it would be the beginning of the end of most webmaster's best performing revenue maker.

The problem with CPA is that it shifts the entire burden of responsibility onto publisher, and it shouldn't. Publishers are responsible and should be awarded for impressions their sites generate (the old-fashioned circulation, if you wish). They share responsibility for click-throughs with "ad agencies" that create the ad; publishers' role is to position the ad unit on a page in the most effective manner. Publishers and "ad agencies" get customers in the door, but it's the job of the shopkeeper to close the deal. Publisher should not be punished for transactions that fail because of the problems on the shopkeeper's end, such as low inventory, confusing store layout or unfriendly service. Look, do you think my ad spread in Cosmopolitan should be free if it fails to move my bling even if my bling is worthless and the distribution system sucks? How many ads have you clicked only to be lead to a page that has nothing to do with the original offer?

It's crucial to understand that social networks are architected to help scale self-expression to new heights, both in terms of the extent of self-expression as well as the reach of distribution (e.g. number of "friends" and the effects of the whole six degrees of separation thing). A simple example... a person on MySpace can have thousands upon thousands of friends. This was not possible before the Internet, and even prior online communications & community innovations like email, chat/forums, and IM didn't truly enable this kind of scale. Moreover, a person can now express him/herself with multidimensional, multimedia depth via text, photos, audio and video... again, to a degree that was not really possible before.

To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the "products" are the people... or as Marshall McLuhan might say, "the people are the message" when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of "cultural products".

I don't mind this as much as I minded SmartTags when Microsoft was attempting to do them (before I was an employee I argued voiciferously against them, along with many other people in the community because we didn't want anyone to be able to use our own words for doing this style of advertising). Choosing to do it on your own blog only gets rid of most of my objection. I still don't like these kinds of ads, though, cause for someone who doesn't know the Web very well you can't tell these are ads at first.

I don't notice them much. When I do see them though they really annoy me - they look far too much like hyperlinks and distract far too much from the content.

It's odd as well that they never feel relevant. Just because a post mentions the word apple doesn't mean I want to buy one (the fruit or the computer). What tends to disturb me more though is forums that use this kind of advertising that I've been seeing a lot. That's putting ads in the middle of your users words and I'd consider it outright unethical.

A lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to her. It's an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and thousands of products from hundreds of other trusted merchants. You can pick whatever content you want to put in your lens to bring context to your topic. Then, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets his started and sends him off in the right direction. It's a place to start, not finish.

We're just out of beta, and we're betting no one is going to retire on their lens earnings. But already some of you have earned as much as $30 (dinner for two!). Others have earned about $1. And still others have pooled their money to send thousands of dollars to places like Room to Read, which helps build schools for children in developing countries.

The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo’s model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts - fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice.

The only unanswered question is whether or not experts will go to Squidoo even without the financial incentive. Maybe, but Squidoo's tools are not particularly advanced - self publishing is easy these days.

Squidoo may generate some content creation growth, but I don't see it generating serious page view growth under their current model.

Blog editor: I blog, you blog, we all blog apparently, judging from the proliferation of blogs in the past two years. The success of influential ones like Wonkette.com has companies wanting in on the perceived edginess of the blogosphere.

"Blogging" is not only starting to creep into people's job descriptions, but recruiters are starting to see blog-related job listings.

One on Monster.com seeks a blog editor "to manage and moderate blogs for clients and to write for the company blog on PR and new media topics."

Jason Calacanis writes: OK, I think we've reached entrepreneurial stasis on this one: The majority will not make a living off blogging, some will. Time will tell how big the some market is, hundreds or hundreds of thousands. I'm going with the latter.

Alan Meckler writes: Blogs are really diaries or microcosms of what is happening in millions of ways in daily life -- ranging from special interests to business specialties to whatever. Obviously there is money to be made with blogs, but very, very few will bring in more than a few hundred dollars per year.

Jason, good stuff as usual for one so sharp and original! But look at the number you have in your reply --- 500,000 per month (page views) is virtually unattainable for 99.999% of all bloggers.

My blog only gets about 300,000 per month -- so with your model I might make enough money per month to buy a candy bar. And I have the advantage of getting promotion through the Internet.com home page as well as many links to other bloggers.

Your concepts are good, but once again only for a selected few.

Do you know your net worth?

Jonathan Ping, 27, does. At $91,820 he's a far stretch from his $1 million retirement goal, but he's keeping track of it.

And you can, too. Log onto his personal finance (PF) blog and see what he spends for the day, what his investments are and what he deems to be money saving tips.

"Many of my friends have bought luxury cars and are enjoying big vacations and I'm not. They see my small home and think 'Gee, is that all you can afford?' And yes, it is all I can afford. I'm not taking on debt. I'm not rewarding myself now because I know that I will have to pay for it latter."

I started blogging because I wanted a more emotional record of what I was attempting than Quicken could give me. I thought that by making my intentions somewhat public that I'd hold myself more accountable (it works for me). And I also wanted to break the silence that many women seem to have when it comes to talk about money.

Bloggers
Pay someone to write snarky comments? Do you think we're getting paid for this?

Bloggers at the Washington Post are wondering if they should be paid extra. (ex BusinessBlogWire) This made me think about... myself. I'm on unpaid leave from BusinessWeek, and I'm continuing to blog on this commercial site. Is there something wrong with that? True, I'm continuing to receive benefits, including health insurance. But other journalists get the same benefits when they're on leave, and they don't have to blog.

Here's the key: I don't want to stop blogging. If BW kicked me off this site during this leave, I'd start another blog where I'd also blog for free--presumably, with less traffic.

Editors at the Washington Post are wrestling with discontent from reporters who think they should be paid extra for contributing to a group Web log. The Washington City Paper reported staffers on the Post's metro section asked for extra money after learning some prominent byliners were being paid for Web logs while they would not be.

"What they told us was that a single marquee name like [Marc] Fisher or [Joel] Aschenbach, who has sole responsibility for doing this -- they're the ones who get compensated," said Eric Weiss, a D.C. government and politics reporter.

A metro-section editor, Robert McCartney, told reporters the Post's attorneys had determined it could compel employees to blog, the City Paper added. A representative of the Post's Newspaper Guild unit said the question of whether blogging is mandatory remains "unsettled."

"A few months ago when I decided to return to school, I realized this meant having no steady income, incurring high tuition fees and purchasing expensive textbooks - something which I did not like the sound of. In order to finance my education, I started to find other ways to make money without working a full-time job. This included investing in the stock market, selling goods and services on eBay, and creating popular websites. I created a journal of all these efforts at www.cwire.org which has become much more popular than ever expected," he said.

Advertising on podcasts, which are invariably free to the end user, is in its infancy to put it mildly," says Mr. Chapman. "However, the nature of the audience and strong growth in its numbers have already driven major brands to invest in podcast-based promotion. More advertising and sponsorship will inevitably follow, as evidenced by the sprouting up of several companies dedicated to facilitating podcast advertising and measuring its effectiveness."

In their pursuit of venues that deliver a measurable, targeted audience, online advertisers and marketers are paying serious attention to this new "anywhere, anytime" channel.

While Gross might scoff at Pajamas Media, the conservative blog network is one of many such blog networks that are banding together to find ways to make money. And if the blog business was really over, why would Gross himself have a blog about business, with advertisements prominently placed?

The irony of ironies is that Slate ends up getting more traffic to its story (thanks to blogs linking to it!), thereby making more money for Slate by knocking blogs as a business.

So the next time you see a journalist hyping blogs or knocking them off their pedestal, consider the less glamorous middle-ground take that blogs are doing just fine - not world-beating and not flailing miserably - but just fine. And I won't be hurt if you decide not to link to my not-so-sensational theory.

I'm not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org...those things just aren't interesting to me.

The other big reason is that my life has changed a lot in the past year. Growing a new business with a novel (or at least challenging) business model requires lots of time and energy to build the necessary momentum...basically approaching it with a startup mentality: long hours, work on the weekends, less time to spend with family and friends, making work the #1 priority, etc. My (unstated) intention from the beginning was to approach the site as a startup, but along the way life intervened (in a good way) and I couldn't focus on it as much as I wanted to. The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.

Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.

1. That I am opposed to the use of corporate advertising on blogs.
2. That I feel the use of corporate advertising on blogs devalues the medium.
3. That I do not accept money in return for advertising space on my blog.

The latest scuttlebutt is that MSN Spaces is partnering with Getzville, N.Y.-based Kanoodle Inc., a provider of Web advertising. This way, MSN Spaces bloggers can choose ads to display, and share in revenues based on the number of clicks generated, according to the sources.

Firstly, it allows a user to publish different information to different groups of people. Personal information can be available only to their Messenger contact list, for example, while business related information could be available publicly.

Secondly, it allows people who subscribe to your information to be automatically informed of any updates you make, be it via your Spaces profile or your Messenger and Mail Beta contact list. It is worth noting that users can view who has subscribed to their Live Contacts information.

Burnham's Beat today reported record results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2005. Revenues for Q4 2005 were $168.64 up 176% compared to $61.08 in Q4 2004 and up 27.3% sequentially vs. Q3 2005. Earnings before expenses, which management believes are the most cynical results we can think of, were also up 176%.

Commenting on the results, Bill Burnham, Chief Blogger of Burnham’s Beat explains "This quarter's results continue to demonstrate that blogging is a complete waste time. While we did not achieve our previously forecasted results of 100 billion page views and 'Google-style cash, Baby!', we remain hopeful that people forgot about those projections. There are several reasons for missing our projections including an outage of our hosting provider in late Q4 which cost us a least $1.00, the continued poor quality of the writing on the site, high oil prices, several deals that slipped to next quarter, and uncertainty created by the war in Iraq."

The current high bids are 60K, 65K and 72K. The private auction will be ending today sometime, after which we'll get down to the business of sorting out the transaction. Once that's all done, we'll be announcing the winner at whatever time works best for the winner.

The current high bidders are all looking at the blog as a brand / profile investment more than a pure cash investment. After all, 36 times monthly revenues is a fairly high multiple for any site, even if it experiences 10% growth every month (as Blog Herald does) and could earn more. At 72K, it would likely take someone about a year to earn it back with a redesign and with the growth it's experiencing.

Some bloggers are paid for posting their observations. At Wofford, for instance, student bloggers receive $25 per week. Allison Kretz, a sophomore at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, earns $500 per semester for being an online scribe. Colgate's Burnham, on the other hand, received no compensation.

Until the university approached her, Kretz had never considered becoming a blogger. "I had applied for a tour guide position, but I didn't get the job," she said. "But they had my references from professors." The recommendations, and her desire to share her college experiences with family and friends, made her an ideal blogger. "I've really fallen in love with the university, and it's a good way to let people at home know how I'm doing," Kretz said.

Bloggers don't rely on a set of rules or a handbook to guide them on the content of their posts. Instead, the universities rely on the students' good judgment. "As for the rules, we don't have formal written guidelines," said Colgate's O'Keeffe. "But I sit down with the students and have a good discussion about the university's expectations and goals. I let the students know we're not interested in posts about parties or trips to the local taverns."

1000Tags is different enough from MillionDollarHomePage that I think it will have a lot of sucess, too. They call it "the first commercial tag cloud". And that’s exactly what it it. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result.

They are selling up to 1,000 tags. Tags can be exclusive (click the Star Wars tag), but cost significantly more, and they will only sell 50 of them. The remaining tags link to a results page with what appears to be an unlimited number of results

But just like any new fad, interest wanes and less people blog until the blogging becomes almost nonexistent. Now marketing is left scratching their heads because they have a built an infrastructure and spent a good deal of money and now they are in desperate need of content. This is where I introduce to you the ghost blogger and the ghost blogger service -- passionate writing and informed content for hire.

The ghost blogger headhunter may get involved or a specific ghost blogger will get hired at this point. The writer's job will be to post eight to 12 blogs per week on the company's corporate Web site. These writers can get paid $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the traffic they generate.

For example, if a blogger is paid a base of $2,400 per month, she could receive an additional amount of money based on the amount of traffic she brings to the site. If the average traffic is 100,000 page views, she could get a bonus if it goes up to 110,000, 120,000, 150,000 or 200,000 page views and so on. The more buzz produced, the more money earned.

November income for J-Walk Blog was $52.35 from Google AdSense, and $82.54 from eMusic. Total = $134.89. In November, I made 428 posts, which works out to $0.31 per post. If we deduct my $75 monthly hosting expense, my per-post income is reduced to $0.14.

So. How much does this site bring in? Last month, November, Google Adsense revenue was close to $700 (not allowed to give you actual figure), Blogads revenue was around $121, DU Network stipend was $150, Chitika was around $212, direct ads were $410 and Vibrantmedia was $140. That makes for a total of $1733.

To date, votemerich.com has relied on word-of-mouth advertising to attract attention. Thirty-six bloggers have registered, all vying for a shot at the prize.

The site works like this: contestants tell tales of woe, spin laughable yarns, poke fun at other contestants and even resort to begging to convince others of their dire need for the cash. Adbright.com, an online advertising agency, tracks the number of bloggers who link to advertisers on the site. Every link means a few pennies added to the jackpot. Once the kitty reaches $1,000, contestants will be asked to vote for the top bloggers. After a round or two of voting to narrow down the best of the best, a winner will be chosen.

Here are a couple of small pointers to existing candidates and future candidates. Just like launching a website, launching a candidacy will require some work, in addition to blogging. You'll probably need to get your friends to sign up so you can get an initial core set of constituents. They will be your primary advocates, helping get out the word about your candidacy and giving you feedback on your Vote Me Rich approach. Also, you need to actively seek new advocates, either through registered users of VoteMeRich.com or through other sites that encourage community. I believe it will take someone active in the online community to win this competition.

After beginning as a vehicle for anti-establishment, noncommercial writers, many Web logs have laid out welcome mats for corporate America in the last couple of years. No one tracks how much advertising money is flowing to Web logs. Nor is it clear how many bloggers, like Campbell, disclose their sponsors. But when writers have not been completely open, their fellow bloggers have been quick to criticize.

Businesses have noticed the growing readership and influence of these Internet postings and are spending $50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, a company that looks at the impact of technology on business and consumers. Recognizing that blogs have become more mainstream, companies are paying for advertisements or mentions on blogs, courting blog writers with public relations efforts and inviting writers to come blog on one of their corporate sites.

USWeb, an online marketing firm, has run campaigns this year that pay people $5 to mention a company or link to its site. Most of the companies USWeb works with do not allow the company to identify them, said Ed Shull, the chief executive of USWeb, but some that he can mention include Lussori.com, a watch and jewelry company; Dot Flowers; and Terra Entertainment.

Copeland does have some basis for that claim. "There are about 18 million people [currently] blogging," he said. Let's say that's the number of people who have set up blogs. The number of people actively blogging is, say, half of that. Of that number, how many regularly update content? How many update their blogs weekly, or even daily? The reality is there are maybe 10,000 to 100,000 really active (hourly or daily) bloggers who get significant traffic numbers.

Maybe 10,000 to 100,000 doesn't sound like very many active blogs. But consider this: There are 49,000 daily journalists in the U.S. Conceivably, there are more well-informed, active bloggers out there than active journalists. That's potentially tens of thousands of really influential people. People with an audience. An audience you can reach through their blogs.

The power of the press... press release that is. So last night at 2am central time my press release finally went out. Yesterday I wasn't really sure what would happen. It could have brought me 2 visitors, or it could have brought me a little more. Well, I would say it was $30 well spent.

Within 12 hours of the release going out, I have already been contacted by 3 local news stations. In fact, in just over an hour the first one will be showing up at my house for an interview. Later tonight the other two stations will be doing the same. Let me also share the release stats with you:

The past 12 months have been smoking hot for online media mergersand acquisitions (M&A). Why the sudden interest in online properties that largely have the smell of Web 1.0? Perhaps it's the belated ascendancy of online advertising, with study after studyshowing that ad money is now chasing consumers who are turning to the Net over traditional media.

Add to that the desperation of old-line media companies worried that theirold-line businesses are getting stagnant, and the situation equals anincreased interest in highly trafficked content sites, whether they'reblogs, social networks, wireless content or niche journalism. This isn't a full-blown flashback to the late '90s when any e-commerce site could command millions in venture money; it's more of a mini-bubble focused squarely on online media.

Geffs: I can't speculate on that. There's certainly a lot of activity around it, but as always, I don't know if the owners of social networks will make any money, but the guys selling them picks and shovels will. That's what VeriSign did with Moreover. I think another interesting area that will make money is ad networks that are tapping into the blog world because as a large number of viewing minutes move into blogs, advertising would like to follow. There's money to made in providing an efficient and reliable way of doing it. Ad networks will be profitable, both from a business standpoint and from my world, from an M&A perspective.

Blogs will play an important role in the future of advertising, entrepreneurs said Tuesday, but for now the bulk of ad dollars from these web journals still appears to be flowing to search engine Google.

Venture capitalists and Internet executives gathered at the ThinkEquity technology and investor conference in Half Moon Bay, California, are looking for ways to make money on the trend of consumer-created content such as blogs. Blog web traffic was up 31 percent through the first seven months of 2005, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, and hasn't shown any signs of slowing.

Much of the money to be made now seems to be flowing into the coffers of Google. The company's context-based advertising scheme makes it easy for bloggers to quickly record advertising revenue.

How does Chitika's Publisher Referral Program work?
When the publisher you refer applies for eMiniMalls through your referral link, is approved, and then displays Chitika's eMiniMalls on their website, you are eligible to receive Publisher referral commissions. You will earn 10% of the CPC revenue that your referrals earns for up to 12 months from their approval date.

Did these prominent leaders of the blogosphere take the money and run?

The valuations on those deals seem weak which suggests the owners couldn't see much upside ahead. Put some lipstick on the pig, I think was the expression sometimes used in investment banking circles. Well, if they were pigs, congratulations gentlemen, you got one over the suits.

And of course, the new owners might be more able to scale those assets across their broad infrastructure and customer base. Or they will have no idea what to do and will keep buying dated books on internet marketing :-)

Well, here's the deal people : You have crossed the line. It is not viral marketing on my blog when you pay for advertisment to other bloggers. When you do that, you have an ad campaign in place. Asking me to do it for free is in labor-talk, "explotation".

I am going to go one step further. To expect me give my labor for free when you have deliberately passed on paying for advertisement on my site is tacky, rude and, quite frankly, insulting.

And what is most upsetting about all of this? These people are supposed to be the champions of the new labor movement.

Sorry honey, but I am not your blogmonkey.

On a per month basis, 69% of our bloggers (those who previously indicated they participate in advertising programs) earn less than $20 per month from all income sources: advertising & sponsorship. It's rather a pity that so many bloggers, of whom we have identified as being experienced, are not seeing any return for their efforts.

You can see from the graph that there is a real hurdle between $50 a month and anything above. From general experience, I know that blogs tend to go through several earnings ranges. You can be stuck on one range for a long time then jump up to the next without really experiencing a gradual incline in that direction.

Well, to me, niche blog networks are just a variation on the old "web-rings" many of us used to join as personal bloggers. Remember those? You found a web-ring filled with like minded people, dropped a little code into your site and, with any luck, readers of other blogs would come find you that way. The web-ring soon became the ubiquitous "blogroll."

There's more pretentious networks that can't seem to impress me at all. In fact I don't even understand why someone would want to write for certain types of blog networks, especially the ones that want to 'own' your content and / or want part of the cash your stories generate. What's the point? Why not start your own blog?

I guess the only network I like is 9rules, largely because they don't limit bloggers that are in the network in any way, don't try to 'own' their content and don't try to snatch a share of their AdSense revenues.

How does Chitika determine what product to show in the eMiniMall?
At first, eMiniMalls will display products that are extremely targeted to your website's content. Then, over time, the content and behavior-based Feedback Loop intelligently learns what products are working best for a particular website and will prioritize those products for display.

The potential pitfall of this approach, of course, is how well context can be inferred by examining keywords. This was gruesomely demonstrated in the early phases of an implementation with the New York Post when an advertisement for luggage appear in next to a story about a murder where body parts were stashed in a suitcase. Google states that it has since made improvements to AdSense designed to prevent such inappropriate placements.

1. No barriers to entry. The publishing platform is free and easily hackable (Wordpress). Google Adsense is available to anyone with an email account. Topics are a dime a dozen. And design can be outsourced. What’s left?

2. Brand is the only competitive advantage. So if you can't compete on technology or advertising, what can you compete on? The publisher’s brand. Even though I've been publishing online for several years now, I really haven't spent time building credibility. This point is unbelievably crucial. It’s just critical.

It wasn't long before the gaming webmasters, who originally started their gaming news sites as a hobby, started demanding pay raises for their work and no longer saw managing their website as a favored pastime. Once a price tag is attached to a hobby, it no longer becomes a hobby. Webmasters defected from one gaming network to higher paying ones. Networks poached webmasters from rivals by offering higher incomes. It was a cut throat environment. This hasn't happened in the blogosphere yet, but I can already see the writing on the wall as weblog network owners are being labeled "slave drivers".

It was the low barrier of entry that created the gaming network popularity and it was the same low barrier of entry that destroyed it. Because the barrier of entry was so low everyone was entering the market. Just like in the blogosphere there were dozens of websites about each niche interest. Advertisers caught wind of this and the advertising money was quickly pulled. The largest online demographic with significant buying power (ages 14-25) was no longer able to keep the attention of the advertisers. Advertising contracts were drying up and websites were shutting down.

To lay it all on the line, blogging is a waste of time. Why spend time telling strangers your innermost thoughts when you could be out making memories with those you care about most? I'm not saying all blogers are losers, I'm just saying that most of them are.

Independent podcasters don't have the assurance of a built-in audience whose demographics they can rely upon. In fact, they struggle to even accurately count the size or makeup of their audiences -- information that advertisers covet. Some have rough ideas based on e-mail responses, site hits and, if they're lucky, download figures, but they say they can't tell how many people are listening through Apple's iTunes service, which doesn't share its statistics.

That's frustrating for folks like Cinecast's Hallgren and Kempenaar, whose show has been featured a couple of times on iTunes' homepage. The duo believe that iTunes is caching Cinecast on Apple's servers, and while they're grateful for the attention, they say that as a result users who subscribe to the podcast aren't downloading the program from the Cinecast server, making it impossible to accurately count the audience.

Many early podcasters say they're in it for the long haul and expect profits to come later.

"I think there is a lot of money to be made out of this, but it's in its infancy," said Mark Vavrick of Renegades of Comedy. "There's a lot of people with computers, but not everybody knows these shows are out there yet."

"I have 50, 60, 70,000 listeners. I could make a couple of bucks off that, but not much. If you are talking a million podcasters, and then you can kind of divide that amongst ourselves, then that is kind of interesting."

Essentially, he says, if you are doing a bass fishing podcast, someone who is selling bait and tackle will probably want to advertise on your show.

He is clear the ads will not be the traditional "in-your-face" type familiar to commercial radio now.

"We are really going to see these microcosms and commerce will be all over the place."

Calacanis employs 120 bloggers and publishes 90 blogs -- including Engadget (which covers consumer electronics) and Blog Maverick, typed by billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban -- with his writers making anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month. (One presumes Cuban doesn't do it for the money.) On average, Weblog salaries are about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute.

"Not to mention (bloggers) get to write about the topic they are most passionate about," said Calacanis, who claims to be on track to collect more than $1 million in Google AdSense payments over the next year. "So, for our folks, it is like they are making money off their hobby. Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games."

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: "If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage."

As many as half of respondents say they write a blog because it serves as a form of self-therapy. Further, one third of bloggers write about self-help and self-esteem topics. Thirty-one percent either blog or read blogs in times of need or high anxiety, while only five percent prefer to seek help from a counselor or mental health professional. The only thing more popular than blogs in times of need is seeking advice from family and friends.

The blogging population who do so for personal journaling is no surprise to AOL Community senor programming manager Joe Loong. "Knowing how I blog personally when I'm not on the clock, and how my friends blog," Loong told ClickZ Stats. "The vast majority of us are blogging about what's going on in our lives."

While there are numerous high-profile blogs that report on news and current events, only 16 percent of bloggers do so to pursue journalistic aims, 12 percent blog to break news or advance news and gossip, and eight percent blog to "expose political information".

A majority, 66 percent, don't feel pressure to update their blogs frequently, yet 65 percent pay attention to how often other bloggers post new entries to their blogs. In the casual blogging network, only 13 percent of bloggers become disappointed to learn other people's blogs attract more readers or responses.