I am more and more annoyed by those in-text advertising float out box now.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, they are the little on screen pop up boxes triggered by your mouse hovering over some text that are double underlined. The content showing inside the box is supposed to be relevent ad content for the text.
The problem is that most of the times the ads are irrelevent, at lease based on my experience. For example, I visited someone's blog and there is mentioning of the "front page of Digg", and guess what in-text advertising showed me? The Microsoft front page product. Unlike adsense ad, if the in-text ads are based only on the selected text, it is a lot harder to figure out the relevant one.
The in-text ad is also a distraction to me since I have to be careful about where my mouse is to avoid them showing up.
Unless those in-text ads become more relevant, they are just another form of the popup window that has been annoying the websurfers for years. Eventually some browser plugin will be developed to disable them.
When starting a new site, it can be difficult to find some initial users and gather feedbacks for a small site with limited budget.
Stumbleupon.com can be a good place to start some advertising and testing on the broad market. If you haven't tried StumbleUpon yet, it's a website that categorizes a big pool of websites and pages and show them to websurfers. A user can setup an account and select the categories that interest him and stumble away by clicking on the StumbleUpon toolbar on the browser.
To advertise on it, you can create an account and add the URL that you want to be included in its big repository. You can select the category and also customize who you want to show to by selecting the gender, age and geographic location of your visitors through StumbleUpon. Each showing will cost $0.05, and you can put a daily budget by limiting the showing number and max spending.
Once your ad has been approved, you should start seeing the report about how the StumbleUpon visitors think your website. Unfortunately right now there are only 3 opinions, like, dislike, or neutral.
What I like about it:
I believe the StumbleUpon users are early adopter of new things on the web. So they are more likely to viral marketing for you if your site is really a hit. Plus and your visitors are those who are interested in the subject so they are more likely to be your targeted visitors in the first place.
Although most of the stumblers choose not to rate (at least in my ad experience), you can still get some feeling about the acceptance of your site. Granted, if most of your feedbacks are negative, there is definitely something you want to look into.
How can StumbleUpon improve the system:
If StumbleUpon can encourage the stumblers to rate more and even add some comments besides like or dislike, it will be a hugh help for advertisers. I would even create some power user groups system and pay them for rating and commenting (Well, this may be already in place under the cover). This would attract more advertisers since the system essentially offers a focus group to the web designers. And if you can get a thumb up/down and a small comment for 5 cents, it's a pretty good deal.
Stumbled upon this site today…is this the future of the interactive web site…? http://www.msdewey.com/ Once the flash is loaded, a laby is on the screen to ask you to type something in the search box. It's like watching someone live in front of you. I have to say it is nicely produced so it doesn't seem too boring. I typies in different search terms such as: tennis, beer, new york, you suck, "who am i"…,� besides the search result on the right side of the screen,� Ms. Dewey actually� "spoke to me" and most of� what she said were� quite relevent to what I searched. The funniest answer is for the last one: "you do know I have your social security number, do you?" Although I will not use this site for search, I certainly had some fun. 
This is a Microsoft product…
Installed IE7 over the weekend and gave it a spin. I have to say I was pretty impressed. It looks like IE7 has borrowed some design concept from Opera, which is giving the user more room for the web page, and minimize the occupation of the menus and toolbars as much as possible. This is what I like the most. I tried to install an add-on, but got as far as to the point of downloading it, when I see it is an seperate intallation program I ducked. For a moment the "phishing filter" tool caught my eyes. It checks MS's database to see if the website you are visiting is black listed. I wonder how good can� MS keep their database updated. Overall I like the new IE7, but I wonder if it is designed too much toward the technical savvy crowd, regular users may need to take time to cacth on. As far as the security concern, what's new? IE has its foundamental flow and so many really smart people try to crack into it, so don't be surprised to see them coming.
I know I know, people have been talking, blogging, and pod/tube/digg casting about this subject so much and you might have got tired of this. Just bear with me here. Google offered to buy YouTube with 1.6 billion dollars, in their stock. How much is Google worth today? $421. I guess the big question is: how much does it really worth? If you think Google is really only worth $100 a share, YouTube will be price around 400mil, in your price estimate. Still a hefty price though. Google's market worth is 128B, and if you have $128 in your wallet, will you pay $1.60 for a nice lunch? Absoluely. This is a great deal for Google. So everyone wins, I guess this is the beauty part of it. It almost feels like a website's value is again largely based on a perception these days. I don't want to predict the bubble, but can I quote Mr. Greenspan's word, "irrational exuberance"?