It’s an interesting time for the poker industry in the U.S. as multiple laws have been introduced to Congress regarding the legalization of the online game. The poker community has been pushing for such legislation for years and is optimistic that some type of action will happen soon.

Payment processor Account Services Corporation has filed a motion in federal court for the return of about $14 million seized by the government and owed to online poker players.

The move comes from actions taken in June, when the U.S. froze assets totaling around $33 million belonging to Allied Systems and Account Services.

Federal prosecutors have ordered four U.S. banks to freeze payments of more than $30 million owed to people who play online poker.

The frozen payments are owed to 27,000 online poker players at four offshore sites, including PokerStars.com and FullTiltPoker.com, according to John Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), an advocacy group.

The Poker Players Alliance (PPA), a grassroots advocacy group with more than a million members, is praising the release of the White House Citizen’s Briefing Book, a compilation of voter led policy proposals that includes as one of its top priorities the licensing and regulation of online poker.

Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) has introduced legislation that would allow Americans to bet online and end a 3-year-old ban on Internet gambling.

The Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act would create a federal regulatory and enforcement framework allowing Internet gambling operators to obtain licenses to accept wages from people in the United States.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have issued the final rule to implement the controversial Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).

The Act prohibits gambling businesses from accepting payments from unlawful Internet gambling sites, including payments made with credit cards, electronic funds transfers, and checks.

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

AdWords clients may see an invitation to join the beta test of Google’s pay per action (PPA) advertising appear in their accounts.

Google has announced that its pay-per-action advertising beta is now open to international advertisers.

The pay per action beta test for Google AdWords recently debuted, and spurred plenty of advertiser interest.

I love it when I get a comment that is better than the original post. Last week, I chimed in with some thoughts on Google’s experiment with pay-per-action (PPA) advertising, and I got a hugely detailed comment this weekend on that post, so go re-read that entry to see it. (I’ll wait.) When you come back, I’d like to talk about it more.

When Google slid its new Text Link Ad product under the Pay-Per-Action rug, bloggers who noticed immediately started comparing the in-text advertisements to Snap.com’s content preview bubbles. But Snap.com’s none to happy about being lumped into the same camp as IntelliTXT.

If you’ve noticed, the way Robert Scoble did, Google has cut the number of AdWords ads appearing in its search results. And though that seems like a counterintuitive move, potentially angering advertisers while dropping profits for Google, it may be smarter than you think.

What’s been called an assault on click-fraud, or affiliate networks, or both, could also carry with it a little controversy. Google’s recent beta launch of pay-per-action AdSense, available only to US advertisers, was released overtop another new product: the text link format ad unit.

There are lots of bloggers talking about Google’s launch of their Pay-Per-Action (beta) program which is really just adding CPA ad units to Adsense with a name to not associate it with CPA directly.

It’s been rumored for a while, but it’s finally being tested, as Google has announced a beta program to test pay-per-action (PPA) AdWords bidding. The Snap search engine has done PPA for years, but obviously it is big news when Google does it. I first speculated on this two years ago when Google acquired the Urchin analytics firm (now Google Analytics), but it’s finally here. What does it mean to search marketers?

The new pricing model offered by Google to its AdWords clients means those advertisers will only pay Google when a customer converts in a specified way.