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Well, I got my first AdSense payment via Western Union on Friday and I must say that it’s incredibly convenient! Very fast and the exchange rate is pretty decent. I received about half a grand in Malaysian Ringgit and that’s pretty substantial.

So substantial in fact, that I’m going to go furniture shopping with my family later in the morning. I do have some items in mind, which includes:

• Dressing table (hopefully one with adjustable and lighted makeup mirrors) for my SO
• Coffee table for my living room
• Cupboard for my son’s room

In JB, one of the best place to go furniture shopping would be Taman Molek. They have all sorts of furniture shop to fit virtually any tastes and budget.

What’s your favourite furniture shopping area? I’d love to get some recommendations!

I’ve been seeing more and more irrelevant sponsored links in the blogosphere. In fact, I think the situation’s getting worse every passing day. Nothing kills my interest in a post more quickly than seeing an irrelevant sponsored link in the body of the post.

There are three reasons why I think irrelevant sponsored links are evil:

• Sponsored links are of questionable sincerity
• Sponsored links are deceptive and misleading
• Sponsored links benefit bloggers and sponsors but not readers

Read the rest of Why Irrelevant Sponsored Links Are Evil »

And it’s a cheque for US$120.65!

Amazing right?

Read the rest of Got A Birthday Gift From Google »

We know that there are stock exchanges like KLSE and NASDAQ. It’s a typical market-centric approach to trading, and quite frankly it works. Supply and demand controls the prices of shares and the performance of industries in general.

Ever wondered what could be achieved when you apply a similar model in online advertising? Well, wonder no more! ContextWeb has launched ADSDAQ in early May and it will go into beta soon.

The aim of ADSDAQ is to be the first true online advertising exchange. Frankly, I’m excited at the prospect of such an exchange. It takes the nice things about a capitalistic model and applying it into what’s becoming the major contributor of the Internet’s GDP. A major innovation that ADSDAQ’s introducing is the setting of firm “Bid” and “Ask” prices. In fact, this is one of the things that motivates me to actually sign up to be considered as a beta tester.

Love it or hate it, advertising, especially online advertising is an industry worth billions and will be here to stay. So why not profit from it? I foresee ADSDAQ to be a significant player in this industry.

As mentioned earlier, I haved already signed up to be a potential publisher in ADSDAQ. If you’re interested in having additional online revenue, I’m suggesting that you do the same. Hopefully I and a couple of HTNet’s readers will be invited to join.

AdSense publishers are now required to comply with something similar to the AdWord program’s Page Quality Guidelines… shouldn’t be hard to do if you’re not running a splog and/or MFA web sites.

Another wonderful news from this update is that publishers can now place up to three link units on a page. Link units are wonderful income generators, and I’m pleased that we can now have more than one of them on a page.

You can get the full scoop from the Inside AdSense blog.