er... about that last post

Small retraction (rather than editing the original post, how big of me): apparently MS have bought a minority stake in Facebook for $240m, which values the site at an expected $15bn. Serves me right for reading early reports on Valleywag.

The move looks like one calculated to piss Google - who were also in the running to buy Facebook - off, and I have to say, in the terms of large business like this, that's utterly childish and massively hilarious.

I wish I could drop $240m just to bug someone. Hugh wouldn't know what'd hit him.

Advertising?

Yes. I've allowed advertising on this blog, and although I know it might bug some of you, a little back story and an explanation of how it works follows...

One of the things I'm working on at the moment involves looking at advertising options for a media website, and Google Adsense (or a derivative of it) is one of the options. I thought I'd give it a go for myself to get a better understanding of it, so here we are.

How it works is that, when you load the page, Google has a quick scan of the page content, and chooses a contextually appropriate advert from its bank of thousands of adverts. Advertisers pay Google every time someone clicks on one of their adverts, and Google pays a little bit of that to whoever owns the website.

So every time you click on one of the ads on this site, I'll get a weeny bit of cash. Apparently it's bad form to ask ones readers to click stuff, so I definitely won't say anything about how it'd be lovely if you could clicky over there every now and then. Definitely not.

I'll have a play around with different formats and positionings etc, and when I'm a millionaire from all your friendly clickery I'll buy you all hats. Apart from anything else, it could result in some amusing ad / editorial juxtapositions...