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.