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.

Things have changed on the off-line front. I have to go now. It has been a lot of fun. I might be back sometime in the future, but I need to stop for awhile anyway.

TaTa For Now.

Usually, the VHB provides links, charts, stats and commentary (like about the number of properties on the Vancouver market and their average prices, historical patterns, comparisons between Vancouver and other cities) that have the implicit questions -- is this a bubble and will it crash?

His last post on Friday left no indication that a halt was in the works, so those who visited his blog on Monday morning expressed surprise. "This is very sudden and I am sad to hear that the mysterious VHB will no longer be making the prescient posts I have become used to reading over the past 12+ months," said a commenter named Mohican.

"Please!!! Don't go! She'll come round!! Just involve her more...She can do some graphs and you guys can research, together," said a commenter named Mighty Mouse.

"Well good luck with that. If you can, keep the site alive. It will be interesting to go back and check the comments in the future. We are going to look like either prescient geniuses or ignorant boobs. I don't think there is much in between," said a commenter named Freako.

Thanks to all who have posted such nice things over the past few weeks. Life is going very well, thank you. I do miss blogging in a way, but on the whole it is better to get on with the coolness that is life. Enjoy the crash! (Whenever it comes . . .) VHB out.

LAist thinks that January should become Start A New Blog Month and if you've already got a blog that you've turned your back on, January should also be Write Something New on Your Damn Blog Month.

We have a pair of some excellent seats to the Justin Timberlake concert next Tuesday, January 16. Someone who has a blog or a myspace account who has a new post written and who has the LAist button (see it after the jump) on their side bar will get those tickets.

Justin just brought the sexy back to Anaheim last night, tomorrow he's in San Jose, then 1/12 in Sacramento, 1/14 in Phoenix - ok fine Glendale, AZ, and then Tuesday at Staples Center, followed by next Wednesday in Fresno, and next Friday in Vegas.

Since January 1973, the Intelligencer section has been New York's weekly home for news, gossip, short takes, and pithy commentary. Starting now, the Daily Intelligencer is nymag.com's home for that same cocktail of the serious and the frivolous — but blended much more quickly. Daily Intel will filter the stories of the day through New York's unique sensibility, all day long, every day of the week. Serious looks at city news will jostle for space with comic riffs on what's going on around town. Party reports will bump up against Atlantic Yards updates. Think of it as a stream of collective unconsciousness from inside the New York brain.

I've been a fan of Overheard in New York for a while. At some point, it occurred to me that each quote has a pretty precise location attached to it and that it would be cool to plot all of them on a map. I eventually got motivated enough to actually do it. The result is overplot, a Google Maps API-powered visualization of all of the quotes I could get my hands on.

In other news, Judy's Book said that it is adding blogging tools to the site so individuals can create personal journals about the cities in which they live. With the release of the MyBook blogging service, Chief Executive Andy Sack said that the company has "made it even easier for people to share and discover the people, places and things in their communities that matter most to them."

So on our walk this morning Shadow and I went looking around. We found remains of the police boundary tape tied off to stop signs and fencing and trashcans. Lines of ashes on the asphalt pointed to where flares had been struck and put down. And suddenly every dark stain we passed on the sidewalk instantly had the potential to be where the person died. But it wasn't until I stopped in the hole-in-the-wall liquor store next to the Sun-Park pharmacy and asked the owner what he knew that I learned the shooting took place over by near the Olive Motel.

The Michigan Daily entered the blogosphere just this week with the launching of four separate blogs accessible through their website, www.michigandaily.com. The four blogs focus on sports (The Game), opinion (The Podium), news (The Wire), as well as a blog run by the Daily’s editor-in-chief, Jason Pesick. The other sections are maintained by the respective editors of each section of the print version of the Daily. Whether this campus monolith can successfully establish itself in Ann Arbor’s bourgeoning blog communities remains yet to be seen, but only time will tell.

The Michigan Review has maintained its own blog for a couple of years now from its homepage, www.michiganreview.com. Throughout its existence, the site has tended to be a mixture of national and on-campus critique and discussion, with many posts inviting long-winded responses in the comment section. Also, whenever the latest issue of the print version of the Review is available online, the editor first posts it on the blog. The Review has in store a number of changes for this year, though, and readers should look forward to increased blogs by staff and editors, as well as perhaps a change in format.

Scientists at Louisiana State University say their computer models now suggest as many as 80,000 people may have perished. Pray that number turns out high by a factor of 100.

The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building.

Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evaucate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building.

Our plan is to head across the Mississippi River on the Pontchartrain Expressway to the west bank of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. From there, we'll try to head to Houma.

Our plan, obviously, is to resume providing news to our readers ASAP. Please refer back to this site for continuing information as soon as we are able to provide it.

WWL-TV studios are being evacuated as rising water is coming into the station. The French Quarter is taking on water and water is expected to rise in the city for the next few days.

With 328 members in and around the city, this group (blog.meetup.com/1) eclipses its counterparts in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, London and Tokyo. It's bigger than the group in New York City.

It just goes to show that however much they like putting their thoughts online, Seattle bloggers also crave face-to-face contact with like-minded people.

"The meetings are a good way of telling yourself that you are not nuts and there are other people that are obsessed with creating and sharing content online," said Metcalf, who's been blogging 8bitjoystick.com since May 2002.

While some sites get just a handful of loyal followers, Metcalf reports that more than 9,000 comments have streamed in for the more than 1,500 articles he's penned. Video-game companies have been known to keep an eye on his game reviews. "Birds of a feather get together to rant about RSS I guess."

But while Leffelman's playinthecity.blogs.com doesn't mention it, the 23-year-old waitress and aspiring journalist is getting a little help from Milwaukee's tourism office: a year's worth of high-speed Internet access, $1,700 in computer and camera equipment and free access to many of the outdoor diversions she'll be describing in her twice-weekly musings.

Last month, Pennsylvania's tourism site, visitpa.com, launched six blogs written by "real people" taking road trips across the state. Accompanied by digital photos and videos, the diaries cover such diverse pursuits as antique shopping, mountain biking and attending a NASCAR event. The authors - a family of four, a history buff, and a Harley-Davidson rider among them - receive $1,000 for each of three journeys they'll write about this summer.

Minneapolis' visitor and convention bureau, meanwhile, is soliciting applications for three culturally diverse "online tour guides" - a heterosexual couple, a family with children, and a gay male couple or group of gay male friends - who will post journal entries on the bureau's Web sites at least once a week for six months. The bloggers' payback: a "package of fun" that includes hotel rooms, event tickets and gift certificates.

"We focus on media and politics, and opinion," Whited told abc13.com. "Whereas big media tends to put out highly polished stories as finished products, our goal is to keep the conversation going, with lively opinions. It's a little like talk radio, but more informative, and more subject to fact checking."

Anne Linehan is another contributor of blogHouston. The current stay-at-home mom says her favorite topic to cover so far has been Metro. It's a topic that has given her a lot of posts, especially with the heavy media coverage.

"We can do some reporting, but will never be able to match the resources the mainstream media has, and that's fine," Linehan told abc13.com. "Blogs can dig into a topic, expound on a subject, really flesh out a controversy or just provide more in-depth expertise that a mainstream media story can't do."

You walk into a Chinese restaurant and your phone buzzes. It's a blog post from a friend with a simple message: Avoid the duck. This is one vision of future blogging from Qualcomm CEO-elect Paul Jacobs, who just stopped by our office. (He's the one on the left in the photo).

This new type of posting is linked to a certain location. It's called a Crunkie. The idea is that you can leave location-based posts in certain places for your friends. And they pop up when your friends appear.