If you haven’t heard, the Scarlett Johansson eBay auction is now live! Check it out:

Colin Firth went for a cheap $9,300. I would put my money on it that Scarlett will easily top this… perhaps doubled or tripled. Although the auction says it is a meet & greet, some newspapers have reported it as a ‘date’ with Scarlett. If that was the case, this would easily fetch $100,000. As it turns out though, your actual time with the goddess may be quite limited due to her schedule.

The winning bidder will receive:

* Two tickets to the world premiere of He’s Just Not That Into You. The premiere location has not yet been determined but will be in either Los Angeles or New York this July.

* Chauffeured car service to the premiere

* Hair and makeup for one by Privé

* A meet and greet with Scarlett Johansson at the premiere

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q: Is Scarlett Johansson answering emails through this auction?
A: Scarlett Johansson is not able to check emails sent to her through this auction.

Q: How long will the meet and greet last?
A: There is no set amount of time but it is estimated to be a brief visit due to Scarlett’s schedule that evening.

Q. Are travel and accommodations included?
A. Chauffeured car service to the premiere included. All other arrangements (including hotel, flight, additional ground transportation, etc.) arenot included and are the responsibility of the winning bidder.

Q. In what city will the world premiere be held?
A. The world premiere will be held in either Los Angeles or New York. The winning bidder will be notified once the location has been confirmed.

Q: Are there any age restrictions?
A: The winner must be 21 or older, but their guest can be younger, provided that the winner is a parent or legal guardian.

Q: Is my bid tax deductible?
A: Your winning bid is tax deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law. Please consult with your tax adviser for more information.

Popularity: 5%

If you were like me, you would have been presented with the updated Adsense T&Cs, skimmed through them, and blindly hit the accept button. Whatever.

Today I did more reading on it and apart from adding references to video ads which I don’t use or care about, there were a few HUGE changes that absolutely EVERY adsense publisher should be aware of. Makes me wonder why they don’t highlight the changes to you.

1. You MUST have a privacy policy on every site you display adsense

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

crap. What cookie management??? Someone give me a generic adsense compliant policy!

2. More than one adsense publisher ID can be used on the one page

This was removed from the T&Cs:

In addition, You agree that while You may display more than one (1) Ad Unit on each Site Web page, You shall not display any Ad Unit on a page that contains Ads associated with another Google AdSense customer (e.g., Your Web hosting company), unless authorized to do so by Google.

I can see all the free web hosts and adsense sharing site owners rejoicing already!

3. You can have a referal button on its own page without additional content

This was removed from the T&Cs:

Each Web page(s) that contains a Referral Button must also contain other content related to Your Site.

I haven’t used google referrals much, except for get firefox now. I can see this being a huge bonus and might dabble into this again soon

4. You can display adsense on error, registration, thank-you pages… even in EMAILS!

display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page, in any email, or on any Web page or any Web site that contains any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content;

The no adsense on error pages, rego pages, and thank-you pages were always questionable for me. It was so easy to slip up on because often you just install a cms, plug in your adsense code in the template and with most cms you can’t control which pages it doesn’t appear on. This is more an admission from google that they’ve realised it’s not that important anyway so let’s keep it easy for us publishers.

The email part of this T&C is interesting. By removing the reference to emails, this means that now you can display adsense in an email? How do you even do that? I’d imagine you need an email client that lets you edit the html so that you can insert the adsense scripts. Certainly if you just tried this on gmail, it would auto convert your adsense tags into normal text rather than rendering ads out.

I wonder if this is a typo from google in that they’ve actually accidentally removed too much out of this T&C. To be able to include adsense in an email is open slather for all the spammers to embed adsense and get readers to click on the ads. How would google be able to police this when they can’t access the original email that the adsense is displayed on?

Popularity: 4%