Google now has contextual advertising embedded in Google Image Search results - each page has two horizontal sponsored link sections. See screen capture below.
The other popular Google properties that are yet to be monetized include Google News and Google Blog Search.
Related: Batch Download Pictures from Google Images
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/technology/27micro.htm
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26 — The idea of micropayments — charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content — was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea. Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because "users hate them."
But wait. Amid the disdain, and without many people noticing, micropayments have arrived — just not in the way they were originally envisioned. The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small Web sites earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.
"Micropayments are here," said Benjamin M. Compaine, a consultant and lecturer at Northeastern University who specializes in media economics, "they just have not evolved in the way that everybody expected."
From the earliest days of the Web until around the time of Mr. Shirky's manifesto, the expectation was that a handful of companies would provide platforms — or perhaps a single ubiquitous platform — that would enable Web users to pay a penny, a dime or a dollar for a bit of content such as a newspaper article, a comic strip or a research report. Simply clicking a link would complete the transaction.
Sellers of content — at the time, newspaper companies — were among the most interested in the idea as they looked for revenue that did not depend on advertising. And the Web, rather than being a threat to their business, would allow them to expand their audience vastly.
But the problems proved insurmountable. Many micropayments companies have shut down, been acquired or changed their business models over the years. Among them: DigiCash, CyberCash, First Virtual Holdings and Peppercoin.
They used various systems, but in general users paid into accounts with their credit cards and then drew from those accounts. In the mid- to late '90s, electronic cash had become such a popular concept that some politicians worried that it might threaten the stability of the nation's currency.
But the economic and technical challenges were enormous. Consumers were reluctant to pay even a tenth of a cent for something they believed should be free. "There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small," Mr. Shirky wrote in 2000.
It turns out, however, that consumers are more than willing to pay for certain types of content in certain situations. Consumers "expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word," said George Peabody, an analyst with Mercator Advisory Group, which serves the payments industry.
"Closed loop" systems like iTunes are the most successful, Mr. Peabody said. That's where consumers have a continuing relationship with the merchant and usually pay with their credit cards. "Open loop" systems, where the consumer pays many merchants through a single payments processor — the way micropayments were originally envisioned — are much less successful. "To date, the market has said there is insufficient demand for these services," concluded a research report Mercator published in April.
There is another problem with closed-loop systems: cost. The fees for every transaction are too high to make tiny payments worthwhile for many online content sellers — sometimes those fees exceed the price of the content being sold. For most merchants, according to the report, purchases of less than $1.50 aren't worth it.
One solution is to aggregate purchases, or group purchases over a period of time, and then process the payments in a single transaction. That's how iTunes works. But credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard, which charge fees for transactions, "aren't really happy with that idea," said Mr. Peabody, because it means less money for them.
Visa and MasterCard prohibit most merchants from aggregating payments directly. The networks have recently promoted their efforts to serve the "small payments" market — encouraging consumers to use cards for parking meters, for example.
But so far, they have stopped short of widely supporting aggregated-payment systems. There are "operational challenges," said Pam Zuercher, Visa's vice president for product innovation. Visa is evaluating such systems, she added, because "there is an undeniable trend — users want to use their cards for very small purchases."
Merchants can aggregate payments through another company, but that adds to costs and "implementation has been tough," Mr. Peabody said. For sellers of the lowest-priced content — anything under 75 cents — micropayments have been made irrelevant by the easy availability of online advertising, Mr. Peabody said. Programs like AdSense from Google, which allows even the smallest Web publishers to have relevant ads placed on their sites, make micropayments unnecessary. The program pays Web publishers what are often very small amounts each time a reader clicks on an ad.
Looked at another way, though, AdSense is based on micropayments. "All the criteria are there," said Mr. Compaine, the Northeastern University lecturer, "but the money isn't coming from the end user; it's coming from the advertisers."
Bill Densmore, a founder of the payments firm Clickshare, a former newspaper publisher and now a consultant and a director of a citizens' media project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has been promoting micropayments from the beginning.
He envisions Web publishers joining with one another and with producers of other content to create huge networks, sharing users and, in effect, revenue.
For example, he said, a large newspaper could sell subscriptions that would allow its readers to download music from iTunes or Rhapsody, read articles from regional papers, and watch movies and TV shows from YouTube or Comedy Central.
Some material would be sold for a fee — with the payments managed internally by the network. Mr. Densmore acknowledged that this is all pie-in-the-sky at this point. But, he said, for newspapers in particular, the status quo is not good enough. In that business, he said, there are "enough people feeling enough pain that they need to be open to asking what models might work."
Not only did our hormone raging hacker get round the filter, he managed to preserve the status bar, indicating a functional security system. Not only is it possible for him to look at porn, he is able to deceive his parents into thinking he only ever uses the Internet to check New Scientist—the sneaky devil!
The Australian government, understandably embarrassed by the situation, attempted a remedy. A new filter called Intergrad was uploaded to central servers for domestic distribution. A whopping 40 minutes later, Tom rescued puberty-infested individuals across Australia once again.
Senator Coonan, a government official did the best she could to salvage the sorry situation with, "Unfortunately, no single measure can protect children from online harm and ... traditional parenting skills have never been more important." Basically what I interpret that to mean is; "Tom is really getting on our tits; if you don't want your kids looking at porn don't have them in the first place."
The flawed Internet filter is available as a free download here. As for Tom, he is no doubt quickly being escalated to national treasure status. Add him as a friend to your Facebook account, tell him he rocks and ladies, get him laid; if his cyber security cracking skills do not impress you, what ever will? [Herald Sun].
10:30 AM ON SAT AUG 25 2007
| Student’s program sends PR chaos in Wiki-scandal | ||||||
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One American student sent major corporations, governments and even the Vatican on the defensive after coming up with Wikipedia Scanner, a software program that reveals who changed Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia.com is an online encyclopedia edited by general users, who write articles on every imaginable subject. Since it is written by users, anyone can edit, delete and arrange the articles on Wikipedia. What Virgil Griffith did was come up with a program that reveals who edits these articles, via a system where it scans the I.P address and cross-references it with the I.P. directory.
 As soon as the software was launched on the internet, chaos erupted. Among many revelations, Wikipedia Scanner reported that: - Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate
- Apple edit Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival
- Bill Gates revenge? Microsoft edits Apple entries, adding more negative comments about its rival
- The Vatican edits Irish Catholic politician Gerry Adams page
- In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11”
- Exxon Mobil edits spillages and eco-system destruction from oil spillages article
- FBI edits Guantanamo Bay, removing numerous pictures
- Oil company ChevronTexaco removes informative biodiesel article and deletes a paragraph regarding fines against the company
- Scientology removes criticism and negatives article from Scientology page
- Al Jazeera TV station adds that the foundation of Iraq was just as bad as the Holocaust
- Amnesty International removes negative comments
- Dell Computers deletes negative comments on customer services and removes a passage how the company outsources work to third world countries
- MySpace removes paragraph when their website was hacked
- EA Games deletes whole paragraphs of criticism about employment practices and business methods
- Dog breeding association deletes whole paragraphs about fatal attacks by dogs on humans - US Republican Party changes the "Post-Saddam" section of the Baath Party article to a different account of the war, changing the language from "US-led occupation" to "US-led liberation"
- Fox News removes all controversial topics against the network from the Fox News page
- News of the World deletes a number of criticism against the paper
- Nestle removes negative comments on its business practices from its page
- UN address calls journalist Oriana Fallaci a racist ‘prostitute’
- Portuguese government removes entries about Prime Minister’s scandals
- DieBold, the company that controversially supplied computerised polling stations in the US elections, removes numerous paragraphs with negative comments
- Walmart removes criticism of outsourcing work. The retailer also changes negative paragraphs of underpaid workforce
- Sony removes harmful paragraphs against blu-ray systems
- Someone at Reuters calls Bush “a mass murderer”
- Coca Cola removes negative content about its effects
- British Conservative Party removes negative references of its MPs and deletes paragraph of the party’s old policies
- US University adds the “prestigious” adjective to its page
- Boeing edits from “Boeing is a leading American aircraft and aerospace manufacturer” to “Boeing is the leading American aircraft and aerospace manufacturer”
- MSN Search is “a major competitor to Google”. That’s what MSN added to their page
- BBC changes Blair's drink from coffee to vodka and his workout from the gym to the bedroom. Someone from the BBC also changes Bush’s page, changing the name from ”George Walker Bush” to “George Wan*** Bush”
- Someone from The Guardian edits the Wikipedia page of rival newspaper The Times. Originally in the article it is said that The Times sells more than The Guardian. After the edit, The Guardian sells more. Griffith created the tool to "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike," he said on his web site. He admitted that it's impossible to be sure if the edits were made by someone working at one of the organizations, although the I.P. address reveals that they were made by someone with access to their network, he says.
Griffith came up with the idea when he "heard about Congressmen being caught for white-washing their Wikipedia pages," he said. "If the edit occurred during working hours, then we can reasonably assume that the person is either an agent of that company or a guest that was allowed access to their network," he wrote.He said he believes that anonymous speech is important for open projects like Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia works fine today for "noncontroversial topics," he said, but tools like Wikipedia Scanner can help make the site more reliable for controversial topics, he said. | ||||||
Just 2 1/2 hours later, the balloon reached its pinnacle of 117,597 feet—holy moly, that's 22.27 miles above the earth! At that point, the helium balloon burst and its payload parachuted safely back to Earth, where there were a few recovery teams close enough to see its soft landing. Cool pix, indeed! [SABLE-3]
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