The announcement not only introduced users to WordAds, but explained the timing and reason for it, “Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.”

Ouch. Burke explains that there are over 50,000 WordPress blogs created everyday and their new advertising program will provide these users with a tasteful and effective option for advertising.

If you’d like to apply for the program, they’re accepting applications now. However, only certain sites will be accepted with a custom domain being a requirement. The selection process will be based on level of traffic, content, and language utilized on a blog. WordPress uses BoingBoing and Apple Insider as examples of sites which use Federated Media as an advertising partner.

A little over a month ago, Federated Media issued a press release concerning their partnership with Automattic, providing them an option to represent WordPress users through advertising.

Deanna Brown, CEO, Federated Media Publishing, said this at the time, “WordPress.com contributors epitomize the idea of passionate and influential publishers on the Independent Web. They have ardent followings and they present information in a very focused, conversational format, which is exactly the type of media offerings found in the rest of our existing portfolio. They really are an excellent fit for us.”

Twitter has been responding to the news, with most people focusing on Burke’s jab at Google’s Adsense:

It’s interesting that Burke would announce this as a rival to AdSense, considering the program looks to be exclusive and through a partnership with Federated Media. Judging from the ads provided on AppleInsider and BoingBoing, it seems as though there will be very few WordPress sites which would meet the standards set from the application process. Comparing this to the Adsense platform which is massive and represents a large number of sites seems a bit of a stretch at this point. As sites adopt the program, we’ll be able to see the potential it has to rival Google.

Travelers on Virgin America flights this month will also see a host of new amenities and added features including these Google Maps upgrades: Virgin America’s previous Google Maps platform led the industry with interactive maps with multiple levels of zoom.  The enhanced system will feature terrain view maps with fresher images and eight levels of zoom functionality, so travelers can see the actual topography over which they are flying.

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I’m seeing the same thing with Foursquare today. Early adopters are using it, it’s starting to spread, and once again people I know are confused by it, think it’s useless, and that it has no real business.

However, in some ways it may even have a brighter future than Twitter based on creating the location to local business connection. They’ve started to roll out some very interesting partnerships which I assume have revenue implications. If they don’t now, they will in the future as Foursquare’s user base takes off.

Check out this quote for example:

“Being able to drive foot traffic into our restaurant partners and our retail partners is a huge opportunity, because that’s where our product is sold,” said B. Bonin Bough, director of social and emerging media for PepsiCo.

There are going to be some very interesting things that can be done with this, and it’s going to drive Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, and others after checking in and driving local traffic to businesses.

I had my first real example of this when I checked into my hotel for Ad Tech San Francisco, and Foursquare alerted me that I could get half off appetizers in the hotel bar. I had already settled in my room, but it made me think about actually taking advantage of the deal which would have driven more revenue to the hotel. That is worth something to the hotel, something worth paying Foursquare to drive to them. Foursquare also doesn’t appear to be waiting until they’re huge to make this happen, which seems like a wise move to get established as the early player working with businesses.

Kara Swisher of WSJ’s Boom Town interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and learned that all of this confusion is not going unnoticed by the Twitter team and they are working to minimize the issue. The first step is redesigning the home page which many people come to once they have swigged the media Kool Aid around Twitter and its importance to mankind. Swisher tells it well,

Stone said the current page is essentially confusing to the masses of people who come to it, made aware of the microblogging service by the massive media hype it has received over the last year.

People arriving at the new main homepage will be greeted by a search box, information on Twitter trends and a panoply of more specific information about how they can use Twitter.

“You can try it out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it,” said Stone. “We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to.”

At this point it’s easy to say “Well, it’s about time!” but I am starting to admire the ability of Stone and others to take some time with decisions and do things that are practical rather than reactionary. Many media darling companies start to believe their own press and let the media drive their innovation. Twitter on the other hand seems to be taking some cues from Facebook in that they want to make the experience of Twitter the best it can be before they try to monetize. No mention of real time search or anything else here. Just the admission that the current home page for Twitter is crappy and they are going to change it.

Stone put it succinctly by saying

“We have to turn a lot of awareness into engagement. Our front page is not reflective of that right now.”

An additional move was made to help business folks figure out Twitter and how it can be used to their benefit. The company launched a section on their blog called Twitter 101. I gave it a quick once over and I have to admit that they did a real nice job of covering the basics in a way that the uninitiated can understand. Subjects include:

• What is Twitter
• Getting Started
• Learn the Lingo
• Best Practices
• Case Studies
• Other Resources

Now before you run off and complain that there’s nothing new being said or why can’t they provide something we didn’t already know, remember that the VAST majority of people do not get Twitter at all. This is their target for this kind of data and they do a nice job of putting it together.

Oh and who put the information together? In a blog post Stone tells us indirectly that they are not wasting a lot of that VC money.

“We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies.”

Hey, for all of the complaining and hand wringing over Twitter’s approach to this and their approach to that it looks like they are seeing that the real growth lie ahead of them and in order to get the bigger numbers (remember the 1 billion users by 2013 number from the great Twittergate scandal?) they need to educate the masses. Having 90% of tweets coming from 10% of the users is not going to help them grow. Once the mainstream finally gets how this might work for them the real opportunity for Twitter can be realized.

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About half of that bill is bandwidth alone, $360 million. Don’t worry, Credit Suisse showed its work:

To arrive at the estimated $360 million bandwidth tab for YouTube, the analysts assumed the site will receive 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and that a maximum of 20% of those users are on the site at any given time. Credit Suisse’s analysis then assumed each user downloads a video at 400 kilobits per second, to yield a peak bit run-rate for YouTube of 30 million megabits per second.

Other reports have placed YouTube’s revenue this year anywhere from $120 million to $500 million.

Of course, bandwidth costs aren’t new: Facebook has been battling rising costs and falling revenue-per-users for some time. On the other hand, YouTube has been searching for effective monetization basically since Google acquired the company.

What do you think? Can YouTube make money to sustain itself long enough to find a business model that really works?

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In a continuation of the ExecTweets post of earlier TechCrunch reports that more and more third party apps are appearing as ads on the Twitter site. The only difference is that they did not need to pay to be there. In fact, Twitter is doing the courting.

Tweetie developer Loren Brichter says that he actually isn’t paying Twitter a cent to get featured on the site. Twitter came to him, explaining that it wants to promote projects like Tweetie which promote “variety, relevance, and value” (apparently a number of Twitter employees use the app).

Twitter is starting to show some business savvy and brilliance here. Rather than waiting too long to introduce exactly how they intend to make money to survive they are taking advantage of the new wave of Twitter users that are still relatively new to the service and maybe more willing to grow with it. There is less likely to be a hissy fit from someone who sees the service as useful regardless of a few ads vs. the longtime “purists” who will certainly decry the end of Twitter Nation as they know it.

By helping users get more use from the application through promotion of third party apps that further engrain the use of Twitter into the lives of its users, the folks at Twitter are in effect creating a very powerful ad network of sorts. You think the folks at Tweet Deck would be cool with rev share ad agreements to support their business? They don’t exist if Twitter ceases to exist so why not? Would Tweet Deck users revolt? This one wouldn’t but who knows.

It will come down to the people who adamantly oppose the commercialization of the Internet (which are fewer and fewer and are starting to look like elitists who don’t get that the world is bigger than just them) v. those who like the service regardless of ads or not. Actually it will come down to Twitter and its investors making smart business decisions that are about a service making money. Sure they look like Internet hippies right now because of their sharing attitude but do you think that investors are concerned about the Internet’s ethos or the Internet’s profit?

So where do you land? Ads or no ads? The end of Twitter or the start of a real company?

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Many know Six Apart for its blogging tools like Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox, as well as the LiveJournal service it created and sold. Alden told us Six Apart is fully funded, giving them the groundwork to create an integrated ad platform for blogging.

Part of that groundwork merited a couple of moves. Six Apart will partner with Adify to handle the back-end accounting work on the platform. Fredin said their experience handling services for companies in media and technology looking to build communities of web properties has them ready to back this platform.

Control of the platform makes money in social media, as Alden noted. “It should be able to do the same with blogging,” he said.

Six Apart also made an acquisition to support their moves toward becoming this platform. Few outside the web development community may have heard of Apperceptive, a New York-based design house; their client list includes big names like the Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and Cond

Yahoo has a little more to say about their plans to open the search platform to the breadth of information available online.

For one thing, microformats will have a role in getting more data into the search results:

Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback.

Ideally, the communities supporting these formats will drive their adoption by webmasters, which in turn makes more information available to Yahoo Search.

Yahoo also noted it will open the platform to all third party developers. When that happens, Yahoo will launch a beta program for a tool that developers can use to build Enhanced Results applications for the search platform.

Since the end of January, Google received reports about its Android SDK possessing a number of security flaws. As Google released the SDK to the open source community, bug detection would be an expected part of the development process.

Security vendor Core Security provided a lengthy advisory about the Android SDK, which to us indicates the open source process worked. The prototype Android phones seen already won’t be a reality until the software bugs receive the attention they need.

Google made this statement, listed in the advisory, about Core’s findings:

“The current version of the Android SDK is an early look release to the open source community, provided so that developers can begin working with the platform to inform and shape our development of Android toward production readiness. The Open Handset Alliance welcomes input from the security community throughout this process. There will be many changes and updates to the platform before Android is ready for end users, including a full security review.”

The trio of vulnerabilities detected by Core all concerned the processing of images by Android’s web browser. Core said the flaws in processing GIF, BMP, and PNG images could have enabled a malicious website to attack the platform and ultimately execute arbitrary code.

A little sloppiness, not on Google’s part, could be to blame for the problems Core found. They noted the use of an outdated libpng reference library for handling PNG images in a library used by Android. Google has since updated Android with a current version of libpng that should eliminate that particular problem.

Fixes for the GIF and BMP issues arrived with newer SDK releases. However, followup research by Core found the root account arriving without a password by default. “Unprivileged users with shell access can simply use the su program to gain privileges,” said Core.