Blog monetization used to be somewhat of a touchy subject, bringing much consternation from purists. Those days appear to be quickly retreating in the rear view mirror as now more than 50% of bloggers host ads on their sites.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report has a lot of great information in its “Blogging for Profit” section. The fact of the matter is that blogging can be quite lucrative now, and while the median revenue for a blogger is $200 a year, the US average is over $5,000, and the average blogger that gets over 100,000 hits per month is making $75,000 a year, although the median for this group is $22,000 a year.
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Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch is reporting that Google is testing out a new system for displaying search results to searchers.

The usual “blurb” after a URL is located is about two lines long, and consists of the usual meta summary that is defined by smart webmasters looking to maximize their SEO with relevant keywords and a good, short description of what will be found on the site.

Google is testing out two other blurb lengths: one that completely eliminates the description and another that makes it around four times longer and incorporates actual content from the page itself, focusing on content that contains the keyword used in the search.
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Nick Denton–whether you hate him or really hate him–gets the job done. His blog empire shows no signs of slowing down, and after he named himself editor of flagship blog Gawker 10 months ago, traffic on gawker.com has tripled.

Gawker will get about 23 million page views this month, almost three times what the site was attracting when Denton took over in December. But he announced Thursday that he is stepping down from his post.
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Here’s how the Obama/McCain debate drinking game goes: every time Barack Obama says “change,” you have to do a shot. Every time John McCain says “my friends,” you have to do a shot. Judging by the frequency with which Obama and McCain use these terms, you might want to consider shooting peach schnapps instead of Jagermeister.

Why do I mention this on an SEO blog? To demonstrate the power of Twitscoop, a great tool for finding up and coming stories that are buzzing right this minute.
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Here is a pretty cool new feature I saw via Doriano Carta at Mashable: it’s called WiseStamp, and it lets users put a signature at the end of their web-based emails that links to the social networks they are a part of.

As various social networks play a greater role in our personal and business lives, giving your friends, colleagues, and clients easy access to your web presence becomes important in growing and fostering relationships. With this service (and hopefully other new ones like it), giving them access has become a lot easier.
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Oracle has announced its first ever hardware venture, and it’s generating a lot of buzz with promises of unbelievable data query performance, from 10x to 50x today’s data warehouse standards. As Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said today at the OpenWorld Conference, “For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is ten times faster.”

Exadata is a combination of Oracle software and HP hardware, but it’s got Oracle’s name all over it. This move by Oracle is similar to what Apple does: produce their own intertwined hardware and software packages and make the argument that the two go best together, not unlike iPod and iTunes.
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Google has a blog post out today urging its users to ignore current SEO standards about dynamic URLs. In spite of Google’s ability to crawl dynamic URLs, it has been generally accepted sites owners should create static URLs in order to avoid duplicate content, maximize usability, and maximize keyword placement. Long URLs are more difficult to deal with and aren’t usually optimized with the keywords that will lead to better SEO results. So is Google full of it?

Far better and more thorough posts than I could ever write are available by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Adam DuVander at webmonkey, and randfish at SEOmoz, but I’ll briefly summarize some of the reaction I read about today.
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It appears as though the SEOmoz crew has something rather interesting up their sleeves (or, as they describe it, “awesomely big and top secret”).

The Mozplex is asking members of the SEOmoz PRO community to sign up to beta test their new “awesomely big” product before its scheduled launch on October 6th. I’ve Googled and Twitter searched about what this might be about, but it is remaining under wraps for now.

Only 300 beta testers will be chosen to participate in the testing, and users can sign up here. Also, make sure you know which you will choose out of “rock, paper, and scissors” because this may determine the tiebreaker for who gets to be one of the chosen few testers for the new product.
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