Microsoft is gearing up to join the ranks of Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network with Microsoft adCenter.

"Microsoft adCenter is designed to ultimately provide advertisers with a one-stop-shop experience, whether buying search, contextual or display ads across a number of Microsoft properties."

“We are very encouraged by the results of our campaigns in adCenter. In particular, during the pilot, the vast majority of our clients’ conversion rates have been better on MSN than the other major search engines,

[img_assist|fid=252|thumb=1|alt=bloggerparty]

Okay, not really.

I was supposed to be creating some banners for Bloggerparty. Kind of went off on a tangent though! I'm allowed to have a little bit of fun, right?

Click it to see the full size.

Working at home is becoming more realistic for a lot of people. There's websites out there that are paying you per article, per blog, per review. I know when I first started looking for work at home opportunities years ago it was a lot harder to find these types of things.

I think it's great.

That being said, I want to explain how these types of websites that pay you a flat fee for your writing work.

Oh man, I can't stop laughing. Slashdot is bringing in April Fools wonderfully.

I just stumbled upon it and thought I'd share. Slashdot is a technology/science related news site, by the way.

You heard it right - tomorrow, April 1st, is Oral Pixation day.

All you have to do is take pictures of anything (not sexual!) in your mouth and share it with everyone else.

Here's some groups set up for it:

Myspace
Flickr

Or just tag your pictures/blog as oralpixation.

When I first began writing this blog, I limited it to blogging related topics. Since then, it's evolved into writing about anything that happens to involve Web 2.0. I realize many people might not know what Web 2.0 is, though, and so here is my attempt at explaining it.

The term Web 2.0 began at a conference in 2004 or some such. I honestly don't know the details, nor care. There's confusion about what Web 2.0 means, whether it means anything, and even whether people should stop saying it. Here's my definition, nonetheless.

Microsoft's new search engine, www.Live.com is in beta.

When you do a search, you can click on the various tabs at the top, in these categories: Web, News, Images, Local, Feeds, and you can create your own tab. It's very Web 2.0, in that you can even use it as your start page with a list of your feeds, your Hotmail email, weather, sports, and more.

All in all, a pretty nice way of searching, except for one major flaw that makes it useless. It's incredibly slow. I did want to test out how good their results were, since MSN search is notoriously bad, but I just couldn't handle the incredibly slow results.

I'm a little late in reporting this, since Riya opened to the public on the 25th, but I still thought I'd let you all know.

Riya is greatest thing since Flickr. It's a photo sharing site and search engine that uses face recognition technology, meaning it "auto tags" your pictures for you once you "train" it to do so.

Pretty awesome. It's new and still missing some features, but I'm sure they'll be coming.

I don't know what to do. It's been what feels like days since Netvibes.com has been "upgrading their servers". I know this means nothing to most of you, but it means the world to me. It's where all my news is, all in one place. All my favorite blog feeds, my Slashdot feed, my various other news sources feeds.

And it's been down! I can't get to it! It's my startpage which I visit all day long, and I feel so... empty. I feel so out of sorts.

Google Reader finally allows members to share their favorite feeds with other users. It's about time!

Google Reader simply allows you to have all your favorite subscriptions in one spot. Anything with an RSS or Atom feed can be added. You can even "star" items and paste a handy dandy JavaScript snippet on your site to show to pepple your favorite reads.

I just came across my new word processor, and it is, of course, Ajax. Considering I don't have Microsoft Word, this is lovely. A completely browser run application, it looks just like Microsoft Word or any other major word processor does.

You don't even need to sign up. Just go to www.ajaxwrite.com and click on the "ajaxWrite" text to the right, and voila.

A new photo sharing and search engine website, Riya.com, claims it works using face recognition technology. I haven't personally gotten into the photo sharing websites before, but I do find this one quite interesting.

Unlike other photo search site, it does "auto-tagging", meaning that once you or someone else uploads a photo and gives it certain tags, other photos recognized as being the same person or even text are automatically tagged the same.

Having a great startpage is important to me. If you take a look at my laptop, I have three Firefox browsers open, and about 10 tabs open under each one (that's 30 websites). You don't even want to know about all the other things I have open. I go to my startpage several times a day anytime I open a new browser or hit the handy dandy icon that looks like a house there at the top.

I just began using Netvibes.com and I'm pretty impressed so far.

What are tags?

Tags are a way of categorizing. They're used for blogs, pictures, social bookmarking, articles, and more. Instead of the traditional categories, tags allow you to create categories "on the fly". They're then grouped together in a tag cloud, with the most popular tags in a larger font.

Using tags for the most exposure.

Tags give you a lot of freedom and they're easy to use. Choosing the right tags can sometimes be a little more difficult. If somebody is looking for specific information on, say, blogging tips, they might look under the tag, "blog". But you tagged your blog, "blogging tips" and your blog won't be found.

Social bookmarking sites are all the rage right now. If you're still using regular ol' bookmarks instead of del.icio.us, get with the times! People are sharing their photos on sites like Flickr. Even sites like Digg and reddit let others view the things you're interested in.