Nice. We had to set this up ourselves since there was no hosted version.

Quoted: OpenAds, a free and Open Source ad network with more than 30 thousand installs, has announced a forthcoming hosted version of its service and another round of venture financing. RWW's Sean Ammirati discussed OpenAds and the desirability of a hosted version in a May post here titled Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network

Refave. It's interesting that apparently a vertical merger is not considered grounds for anti-trust whereas a horizontal merger can be.

Quoted: The two companies operate in two different stages of the ad-placement process, so the commission viewed the merger as a vertical one. Microsoft argues that the deal would still affect horizontal competition on the Internet — which, though the document does not mention this, would include Microsoft.

Google has revamped AdSense quite a bit, making it easier to customize ads and define channels through the UI, as opposed to having to change your code.

Quoted: URL channels are easy to implement. There are no changes to your AdSense ad code, so you can create your channels from within your publisher account, and immediately begin tracking performance.

I was expecting something like this.

Quoted: Microsoft contends that Google’s $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick would hurt competition in the online advertising market.

Wouldn't have guessed this -- since link units require an extra click.

Quoted: Recently, Julie experimented with optimizing her link unit ad placement. She removed the existing 120x90 link unit from the uppermost right corner of her pages, and instead placed a 468x15 link unit at the top of her articles. In doing so, Julie found a convenient, unobtrusive location and saw her readers naturally gravitating towards the link unit. Her efforts led to an immediate doubling of her revenue -- an increase that has been sustained since the move.

There's at least two noteworthy things here.

1) Didn't know that Adsense has a preview tool.
2) Didn't know you could manually submit keywords to Adsense. How are they doing that?

Quoted: Google Adsense Preview Tool shows sample ads only for website address. The All-In-One Preview displays ads based on both keywords or Website address.

Cool. I wonder if Google AdSense for mobile is close behind?

Quoted: RCR Wireless News reports that Google AdWords customers in the US can now place marketing messages, including linked text, in results from Google’s mobile search service. A similar service has been available for over four months in Japan

Quoted: CPC is, and will remain, the most cost-effective, affordable and balanced ad model for both advertiser and publisher. If its underlying problems can be addressed (click fraud, etc.), CPC can provide a radical improvement to overall ad performance and result in sustained productivity growth. Also, increases in productivity - which we've seen a lot of in recent years - is what most drives economic growth without causing inflation.