The most recent entry in the Google Base Blog mentions that Google is experimenting with letting Google Account users pay for items posted on Google Base via credit card. Shades of PayPal and eBay.

Makes me wonder if someday they'll build a system that automatically creates AdWords ads from Google Base entries to get more people to find things for sale in Google Base and get a cut of the action that way.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

A quick note: the audited eMiniMalls revenue for January 2006 has been posted, with payments soon to follow. My audited revenue is about 25% less than the unaudited revenue. You can check your figures quite easily by opening two browser windows and logging in twice to your Chitika account and using the “Filter by Dates” dropdown in each report window to show last month's earnings.

Once again, I wish that Chitika would improve its auditing procedures. While it's not unknown for Google to make adjustments to an AdSense account after the fact, auditing in most cases happens in near-real-time and so you don't end up with unrealistic expectations as to your payments. Chitika could be running its audits more frequently. Even weekly would be better than monthly.

I'd like to hear from other Chitika publishers as to how much their earnings are affected by the auditing procedure. We could come up with an average percentage by which to mentally reduce future earnings.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

Rather than finish Uncommon AdSense, I've been procrastinating and playing with Amazon product data. If you're not aware of it, Amazon exposes most of its product information for free vis its E-Commerce Service (ECS). With ECS, geeks like myself can plumb Amazon for tasty bits of data, which I plan on using to create additional pages for some sites.

If you're interested in using Amazon data for similar purposes, I've made a simple tool available on my personal site that lets you extract the data for any product that Amazon sells. The Amazon Product Viewer is free for anyone to use, but please read the limitations section on the page. I do have a command-line version that I'll be making available shortly, too, see the page for details.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who normally has a longer bio but is writing this on his BlackBerry and so has to keep it short.