Winners All

This week is all about winners.

Sandra Bullock, Mo'Nique and Kathryn Bigelow win big in the Oscars. Jeff Bridges also had a grand slam bagging both the Academy and Golden Globes for his role in "Crazy Heart". "The Hurt Locker" edges "Avatar" winning 6 out of 9 nominations including the Best Picture Oscar.

Meanwhile, Chile, still reeling from the effects of the previous weeks' magnitude 8.8 super earthquake, has a new President in Sebastian Pinera. On his inauguration day a 6.9 magnitude aftershock still rocked the country. The call for international aid intensifies from all fronts to address the destruction in both Haiti and Chile.

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On another note, Forbes' list of World's Billionaires for 2009 featured Mexico's Telecom magnate Carlos Slim on top besting long-time front-runners Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. 63% of the world's richest are based in Asia. The list also revealed that last year, China had the most billionaires outside of the USA beating India.

The Philippines is also on the list with the Sy Family and Tan Family taking spots 234 and 522 respectively. The mall mogul Henry Sy has a net worth of US$2.7 billion while Lucio Tan is pegged at US$1.4 billion.

Another winner is Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys since the new Cowboys Stadium will be hosting this weekend's biggest event - the Pacquiao vs. Clottey WBO welterweight championship match. This will be the first major boxing event for the billion-dollar state-of-the-art stadium with no less than the biggest name in boxing gracing the home of the biggest name in football.

But then who will be the winner; the champion or the challenger? Follow Daily Dotventures this weekend for the outcome of the Pacquiao-Clottey Event.

The Knight News Challenge: $5M Funding for Big Ideas

"Up for the Challenge?"
The Knight Foundation is setting aside 5 Million Dollars for innovative ideas on digital news media. Referred to as "Digital Experiments in Community News", anybody anywhere are encouraged to submit cutting-edge concepts for technology backed community news projects with the potential of making an impact on real communities.

Last years Knight News Challenge awarded grants to 25 change advocates with prizes ranging from $15,000 to half-a-million dollars. The projects varied from innovative blog series to academic scholarships, from simple web applications to establishing entire media centers. Even MTV got a piece of the action with a $700,000 grant for the Knight Mobile Youth Journalism project which aims to place youth reporters in every state producing video news reports on their mobile phones in relation to the 2008 US elections.

Alberto Ibarguen, President and CEO of Knight Foundation said, "The Knight News Challenge hopes to discover innovative ways of using cyberspace to bring communities together." The foundation will invest some $25 million over a span of five years to fund exceptional community news experiments worldwide. The program is in line with the Knight Foundation's mission to "seed and inspire great journalism everywhere".

Note the following criteria for submission to the Knight News Challenge:

• Use of digital technology - computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc.
• Innovative - It must be different from what others have previously done.
• Access to News and Information - It must provide people what they want to know in a timely manner.
• Community-centered - The project must affect real geographical localities and create a sense of community in people.
  

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There are three categories for the Knight News Challenge contest namely, General (open-source, open standards), Commercial, and the Young Creators Award which is for the 25 years and younger age group.

One can submit as many different ideas as they can come up with. Be sure however not to submit the same proposal on different categories.

Make your mark. You invent it, Knight Foundation will fund it. Deadline for submissions of proposals is on October 15, 2007. Winners will be announced in the Spring of 2008.

Register now at http://www.newschallenge.org and take the challenge.

Making Sense of Adsense for Blogs

One of the advantages I mentioned in "Writer's Blog: A Newbies Primer on Blogging" is the opportunity to earn money through your blog site. Most likely this is the reason that best resonates for many, motivating them to start and maintain a blogging account.

Over the years, the proven way to generate income for blogs is through legitimate implementation of advertising or sponsorship programs. One such advertising program is Google Adsense.

Adsense became Google's main advertising program after its purchase of a then up and coming search engine company known as Applied Semantics in 2003. Since then, it has become the ad server system of choice for many who wish to monetize their respective sites, blog sites included.

If you were to run your own industry standard online advertising program, you will have to figure out which of your website pages would most likely be read by the appropriate audience targeted by your advertisers. You would then have to encode the ad in full layout on the webpage.

In addition, you will have to monitor your ad impressions - defined as a measure of the the visibility of the ads as determined by its size and placement on the page as well as the number of times the webpage has been accessed. Take note that ad impressions is not the same as page impressions or page hits.

You will also have to take into account your click-throughs which essentially is what will make money for you. Your CTR or Click-Through Rate is the percentage of clicks made by your visitors on the ads on your site for each one hundred ad impressions.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to deal with in online advertising than this article would allow. Unless you really want to be an e-marketing professional knowing all these complex terminologies, as an alternative you can just simply link up with a number of establishments and introduce a monthly or annual site sponsorship program in exchange for ad spots and being featured on your blog.

Nevertheless, Google Adsense simplifies the ad process with a packaged system for website owners. Whether with a full-fledged commercial website or a personal blog, Adsense participants are referred to collectively as web publishers or simply "Publishers". It's free to join the Adsense program.

Incidentally, if you have a Google account via Gmail, Blogger or its other services, you can easily tie up your Adsense account with your existing Google account for easy single-sign-on access.

Adsense will provide you with a backend site accessible at http://www.google.com/adsense. Here you can setup which Adsense ad units you can place in your blog. There are numerous layouts to choose from, the techniques to determining which we will reserve for another time. You can select among three existing programs namely, Adsense for Content, Adsense for Search, and recently their Referrals program.

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This is the first part of a series. Part 2 of "Making Sense of Adsense for Blogs" will follow shortly.