Aaron and Cristine Boring sued Google because Google’s “Street View” feature took photos of their home and made them available to the internet. Few of these photos are the ones you see below:

Well, they have the right to sue Google for the so-called “intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion” and “seeking in excess of $25,000 in damages and want a court order directing Google to destroy images of their home.” (source)  But I am just wondering if they really are serious of sueing Google or they’re just interested of the $25,000… I just couldn’t think how rich and popular they are for them to be disturbed when the images of their house have been made available in the internet.

You see, lots of people took photos of themselves and their homes, and then uploaded them to photo-hosts.  And most of these photos can be searched by internet users.

Last week, Google sent me the Adsense Terms and Condition and the Program Policies after logging in to the Google Adsense website. I know that everytime Google do this, there should be changes on the Terms and Conditions including the Adsense program policies. But I didn’t bother reading it. What I did is, I immediately clicked the AGREE and OK links.

That was really a bad move. I should have read the terms immediately and comply any requirements that have been added or else I will be banned from the program.

And yes, there are few changes on the terms and conditions (You can check these by reading Jensense documentation.).

To let you know, there are few violations that I made based on the latest update of the said Adsense Terms and Conditions. I will be modifying all my blogs again just to comply with the Google Adsense Policies.

I started creating my blogs privacy policies but I found it hard to compose. Jensense promised to compose a privacy policy for the Adsense publishers but until now, she still didn’t release it.

Well, Pinoy Blogero offered his privacy policy. I think, I will just copy (plagiarize) it and change some terms.

Check my Privacy Policy here. I will just link to this privacy policy all my other blogs. Anyway, I stated there “SELaplana.Com and Network of Blogs”. So, it is already understood that all blogs that I authored are included with the SELaplana.Com and Network of Blogs.

I thought something happened to my Adsense account. When I logged in today, I was not redirected by Google to the Adsense homepage but in a certain page. My blood pressure raised… That’s the problem if you immediately react without examining first what really happened.

Actually, Google just asked me if I am the only one logging in to my Adsense account. Then I answered if with YES. Then Google asked me again if I have already Google account like email and others, and I answered it with YES. Google again asked me if I want to use my existing Google account to access my Adsense account, and I again answered it with YES. So, I am now using 1 email address to access all my other accounts in Google.

Adsense send me this note:

NOTE At the end of January, we will no longer support referrals to the AdSense product in Philippines. If you are displaying referral units directing visitors to use AdSense, you will need to update your pages. Learn more…

But the link to that “Learn More…” contains nothing but a sorry message.

Anyway, I understand why they’re telling me this. It’s because some of my websites and blogs are still referring users to Adsense, and I think they already stopped supporting referral program.

Inside Adsense

The Inside Adsense blog announced the changes in referral program.

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You’ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

Read the post here.

If you’re serious in making money online by writing or blogging, then you have lots of opportunity to earn much. Just recently, Google revealed its new project that has recently finished its testing phase. This project is called “Knol.”

What is “Knol “?

Knol according to Google is the short term for “Unit of knowledge”. It’s a website similar to Wikipedia and will become a direct competitor of Wikipedia in catering users with knowledge contained in it. The good thing with this new project of Google is that the authors are given due credit and recognition in all the articles published on this site. And not only that, authors are given opportunity to earn from the ads that will be published along with the articles.

Here’s part of the post of Google’s VP Engineering:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

With this, I’m sure lot of us will earn more online. We’ll not just earn from our own blogs and website but also as one of the authors of the “Knol”.