I registered at Newsvine in February 2007 with a little bit by accident. I had just uploaded my first video to Revver and one possibility Revver offered, was to publish it to Newsvine. I did not use Newsvine actively in the beginning, but after few months, I realized, that I can actually make money with it. This far, during four productive months, I’ve made totally: $129.51 with my column – Pasi.

At Newsvine, you can write articles or seed links to different categories: local news, world news, US, sports, politics, tech, entertainment, science, business, health, odd news and other. The local news seems to work only with US writers.

Other users may comment and vote on your article and you are supposed to author the conversation about you article and keep it on topic.

You can also make friends and track your friends or follow articles with keywords. One good feature is groups, which can concentrate on a topic, but it seems to be hard to establish a group, which really works.

For the first months, I tried to search productive area and I wrote and seed about different things, but now I have decided to concentrate on Finland. Here’s my total cash out. As you can see, I’ve started with very low income

Google AdSense is the program that can give you advertising revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources.

Bad think is, that you’ll have to earn $100 before you get payed…

On my experience, less than 1% of the visitors click on the ads. I have put Google ads first to my Virtual Storage and the to other places like this blog. After four months usage, that $100 is a distant dream. I think that it would be fair to pay something, just for showing the ads at your site. I mean, that ads have an influence even when seen, and visitor may read about interesting product and search it afterwards from different place and the actual advertiser gets no profit.

What kind of advertise is showed on your page depends on your decision, the content of your web pages, the location of the visitor and the previous behaviour of the visitor. So advertise content is never the same for different visitors. But if you write about the cars, the ads are most likely to be about cars.

And about the agreement with Google… If the agreement does not scare you then proceed.

You acknowledge that any attempted participation or violation of any of the foregoing is a material breach of this Agreement and that we may pursue any and all applicable legal and equitable remedies against You, including an immediate suspension of Your account or termination of this Agreement, and the pursuit of all available civil or criminal remedies.

First you create an account. You can register for free at Google Adsense.

If I remember correctly, tthe payment transaction was tested in the beginning, which I think is very good. Not like with most of the web earnings, you don’t need PayPal, but you get euros directly to your bank account.

At the beginning you site is also evaluated to see, if it is suitable. But later you can add ads to other pages without new pages being approved.

Then you can choose the style and colors of your advertise script and here’s an example code:

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-6704569940345655″;
//Testi_artikkelia varten
google_ad_slot = “3632896832″;
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

You can choose different Adsense products like:

Normal ads, which can be pictures or text link ad. Then there is Google search box to your pages, but I wonder who might use it. And referring, which are also text links.

Google Adsense provides reports and help for placing the ads at your page, but I have not found them useful yet.

I remember, that I have searched Sid Meier’s Colonization game from Internet before, but I did not find a freeware version about it. Now I’m more than happy to say, that yesterday I made a hit with FreeCol. And of course, what a blogger should do with these kinds of great projects, is to write about them and provide some more visibility to the project.

“FreeCol is a turn-based strategy game based on the old game Colonization, and similar to Civilization. The objective of the game is to create an independent nation.”

FreeCol is team has created an Open Source version of Colonization. And this far (10 hours playing) it seems to work with Windows Vista.

The graphics have developed a lot from these days, but it feels, that the game is a little bit harder, than it used to be. This may be just that I have played with too small map.

Picture: Colonization

The basic elements of the game are:
- exploring and finding cold and other resourecs
- establish and develop new cities
- trade with home country, natives and other Europeans
- warfare (ground and naval
- recruiting new colonists

This game did not ever come as popular as the famous Sid Meier’s Civilization, but I sure did spent some time with this one too. It just has some gaming features, which will guarantee the gaming satisfaction even after years.

I have been PPP blogger with my 2. Space (GoogleRank 3) blog from May 2007. Since that I’ve written 119 posts for PPP and earned about $950.

Picture 1. My blogger dashboard at PPP

But few weeks ago, I started to receive error messages with my posts. With the help of the PPP personnel, we were able to locate the error, but there is no solution for the problem at the moment. If PPP won’t change their system, I’m pretty sure, that Windows Live is not that willing to do it either.

The actual problem is, that Windows Live changes the html -code slightly like in this example:

<img src=”http://tinyurl.com/2zo9bp”> should be <img src=”http://tinyurl.com/2zo9bp” />

So, with PPP and Windows Live “/” ends my business and cuts my income. Luckily I was not doing this as my main work.

Picture 2. A clip from discussion with PPP personnel. (hello to you Mike if you read this)

Things, to learn from this incident

With web 2.0 earnings risk management goes the same rule than with other business: Don’t Put All Your Eggs Into One Basket. You should have several blogs and several business associates. I actually have this blog, and I have made agreements with Sponsoredreviews and Blogitive. The thing just is, that I’m not doing blogging anymore for $10. I rather spend my time in improving my blogs quality to be able to earn more in the future.

I’m not bitter to PPP or Windows Live at all. As an information technology worker myself, I understand the challenges with technology and integration. I know, that you just cannot go and do a small change, without checking it’s influence on the other software.

And I promise to keep on blogging with 2. Space even without earnings and perhaps some day, I’ll be back with blogging to PPP.

The right column from the frontpage seems to be broken after my video post. The problem seems to exist with Firefox, but not with Internet Explorer.