Jeremy Schoemaker from Shoemoney said a really smart way to monetize your blog was through affiliates. Schoemaker said, " I feel affiliate and direct ad sales are the best way to go." He touched on affiliate marketing saying, "The key in affiliates is finding your niche." Everyone has an affiliate, so you should do what you like.

He advised on not using AdSense for blogs and that for affiliate income, banners are also something to stay away from. As for monetizing your blog he said, "Money should be second nature. You can’t plan for when something is going to blow up. It’s all about timing, you don’t know when it’s going to happen."

Rebecca Weeks of Real Girls Media Network spoke about her site Divine Caroline that is aimed at women. She said because of the success of the site they had to launch Real Girls Media to support their strong advertisers demand.

On monetizing your blog she said, "If you have not monetized your blog, you really need to do it." She added "There’s actually no down side with working with an advertising agency."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

When Caroline McCarthy sent out a “tweet,” her original message had nothing to do with anyone’s appearance.  But by the time Charlie O’Donnell received the note, “Wow you look *good*” was tacked onto the end, courtesy, presumably, of Twitter.

The comment was labeled a “tip,” yet I’m not sure who, or how, it was supposed to help.  The length of the thing was also a little alarming; McCarthy only wrote seven words, and Twitter’s addition was four.  Should this ratio remain, advertising might make up almost 60 percent of Twitter messages.

That’s assuming, anyway, that the tips become ads.  O’Donnell writes, “Clearly, Twitter is testing out the feasability, useability, and user reaction to things being added on to user twits.  If successful (or if the users are silent) you would imagine that its only a matter of time before this becomes: Tip: Drink Jamba Juice.”

Messages related to Jamba Juice may be better than what could be interpreted as come-ons, however.

Granted, the data comes from the stretch between July of 2006 and July of 2007, so it doesn’t represent the latest bumps and shifts.  Yet in that period, Hometown and People Connection lost 18 and 42 percent, respectively, in terms of growth.  Leaders MySpace and Facebook gained 33 and 129 percent.

The real miracles took place a little further down the list; Club Penguin and LinkedIn, which are ranked seventh and eighth, both grew by exactly 268 percent.  In regards to that first site, CNET’s Caroline McCarthy notes, “A couple of the names on the July list are riding the word-of-mouth wave: kiddie network Club Penguin, for example, was just purchased by Disney . . .”

And we mustn’t forget Buzznet.  McCarthy reports that this “music-based site . . . is just making its debut,” and what a debut – in terms of a percentage change, it’s gained 423 percent in the past year.  In terms of a unique audience, Buzznet is now at 3.3 million users, compared to MySpace’s 61.3 mil, which puts it last among the top ten sites.

As for the rest of Nielsen//NetRatings’s top ten, Classmates Online was third, Windows Live Spaces was fourth, and Reunion.com was sixth.  The aforementioned AOL Hometown and AOL People connection were fifth and ninth.  Now that does it for the list, and for this article.

“[F]or the past few months we have been meeting with people at all levels of Forbes and the excitement and support they have shown for what we’re creating has been very meaningful to us,” wrote Eric Goldstein.  “As many of you have probably seen already, a number of their writers are already clipping and our technology has been integrated on forbes.com.”

He later continued, “In Forbes, we feel that we have an experienced, highly enthusiastic and hungry team of people who understand and appreciate why clipmarks is special.  I believe they will be very helpful to us in fulfilling our potential.”

But Goldstein also added, “That said, we’re still working to make this happen.”

Credit goes to VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon for causing this disclosure – Eldon broke the story about the acquisition, and Goldstein referenced Eldon’s article in his post.  And CNET’s Caroline McCarthy deserves recognition for spotting Goldstein’s comments – rather than being located on the official blog, they’re floating free within the general Clipmarks site.

One last note, although you probably already guessed as much: potential dates and dollar amounts remain unknown.

Slate is reporting that former New York City mayor and Republican Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, just quit the Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) group on Facebook, but only after Slate contacted her to ask what was up.

And, surprise, she’s not talking to them about it.

A soon-to-be Harvard student, Caroline failed to mark her profile private, and the sleuths at Slate found her out. That’s too bad for her, and a bit embarrassing for Rudy. She tried to hide it at the last minute, but Slate caught a screen cap denoting her withdrawal from the Barack fan club.

This isn’t the first time a child’s social network profile has made a politician’s face red. Wonkette has a running tally of all the social networking mishaps, including the latest on one of the Bush twins and Jeb Bush, Jr. doing some interesting things with a champagne bottle. 

Tim Worstall, Caroline McCarthy, and Johannes Ullrich, among others, have confirmed the outage.  Like me, they can offer little more than their personal testimony, yet Pingdom has some data to prove that we weren’t all hallucinating.

mail.yahoo.com has been down for two minutes (thus far today), according to the monitoring company, and search.yahoo.com has been down for three.  Pingdom acknowledges that shopping.yahoo.com went down for seven minutes, and search.yahoo.com went down for 18.

For all other Yahoo properties, Pingdom was unable to weigh in, but you get the idea.

As for why this happened, there’s no telling – all’s quiet at the Yahoo pressroom.  Caroline McCarthy notes, “Last summer, we saw some heat-wave-related server issues, including a high-profile outage at MySpace.  Some regions of the country have had some pretty hot days recently, so the root of these issues at Yahoo could be similar.”

On the bright side (from Yahoo’s perspective – Google probably had itself a laugh during the downtime), everything’s back to normal now.  If you have any problems over the next few days, though, know that the trouble is likely on Yahoo’s end.

Caroline McCarthy is writing in favor of the service…

The beauty of Twitter is that, unlike a full-out blog, there’s no obligation to be philosophical, thought-provoking or grammatically sound. Because it doesn’t require that kind of extra effort, it’s great for people like me who want to jump on the social-media bandwagon but don’t have the time to set up something elaborate on WordPress.

Meanwhile, Elinor Mills goes on the attack…

I don’t understand the need to spew out personal information and random thoughts to the world. And that’s just what Twitter is designed for: to be a medium through which you can share stream-of-conscious babblings with your friends and with anyone who has time to lurk on the Web site and read inane musings of strangers.

I gave Twitter a solid two weeks and then suddenly stopped using it. I just ran out of things to say, not to mention the time to say it. While I’ve not abandoned Twitter completely – it will be interesting to use it at next week’s SMX conference – I just found it to be too much effort.

Anyone else want to weigh-in? Love it, hate it, just started using it, just stopped? Let me know.

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CBS Snaps Up Wallstrip

Or, as Wallstrip’s founder, Howard Lindzon, puts it, “Yep, CBS has made the absolute genius decision to burn through a piece of their $1.8 billion in Cash Flow to buy/own Wallstrip.”  Lindzon then mentions Jericho, a much-loved show that CBS cancelled, and Imus, the much-discussed DJ that CBS fired.  These obviously aren’t typical we’re-a-happy-family press release subjects, but then again, Lindzon promises he’s “not playing favorites.”

The tone of Lindzon’s post becomes more positive towards the end, however; he calls a CBS price chart “perfect,” and adds, “I like their syndication strategy and I am bullish on Quincy and the Interactive Division of course.”  Wallstrip is, of course, presumably now a part of the Interactive Division.

In fact, CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports that “host Lindsay Campbell and producers Adam Elend and Jeff Marks will become full employees of CBS.”

But those few tidbits of information are all that’s surfaced so far.  A slightly aged article from Jossip puts the Wallstrip purchase price at about $5 million, yet there’s been no confirmation of that nine-day-old report.

In any event, CBS has definitely acquired Wallstrip; the purchase may make the aging network – Lindzon even calls it “old media” – look just a tad younger.

Colbert Sets Off Googlebomb

A large portion of the SEO community had a hand in shaping these results (which lead to ColbertNation.com).  As Search Engine Watch’s Greg Jarboe reported, "It all started at Search Engine Strategies last week, when Jonah Stein of The Alchemy of Search attended a taping of The Colbert Report . . ."

Colbert apparently suggested associating his name with the "giant brass balls" search term; the comedian’s diehard fans seem to have made him the "greatest living American" without any prompting.  And – if we assume that everyone who covered the story is a fan – that fan base includes such SEO notables as Rand Fishkin, Andy Beal, and Todd Malicoat, among others.

Still, we may be looking at the tail end of this rush of Colbert-related hoopla; Jarboe concluded his article by "[hoping] that this little blogstorm has run its course."  Other onlookers, such as CNET’s Caroline McCarthy, feel that Google itself may intervene.

"Google might have to invent a new ‘algorithm’ specifically for Colbert," she wrote.  And yet, in reference to the man who now has his own flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, McCarthy adds, "Unfortunately, that’d probably just inflate his ego even more."

Come now.  The man’s the "greatest living American"; he’s allowed to be a bit prideful.

On January 2nd, the Wall Street Journal debuted its Law Blog online. A dedicated law page also took its place on the Journal’s site.

Compared to the straightforward manner of the Journal’s articles, the Law Blog comes across practically as a night at Caroline’s. One of the first seven entries for the blog’s opening day concerns Gawker Media’s Wonkette blog.

The entry said Ana Marie Cox, the blogger behind Wonkette, will depart to do her book tour. A federal prosecutor who runs the irreverent judicial blog “Underneath Their Robes,” David Lat, has been slated to take over along with a co-editor.

WSJ’s Peter Lattman, lead writer for the new blog, described the Law Blog’s aims in a post:

So far they’re posting at a blistering pace, 24 posts and counting in just under 3 days. They allow comments and publish a RSS feed, too. Now we’ll have to see if Lattman et al can maintain their posting productivity in the long term.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.