After quickly becoming disgusted with lining the pockets of other competing services, I for one look forward to what Yahoo has to offer with this new service.

Call it the battle of the blogs. Yahoo is testing a system that will let it place ads on Web sites of bloggers and other small- and medium-size publishers, a market that was created and is dominated by Google.

Yahoo will invite 2,000 sites to take part in the test, beginning today, and will open the system to blogs and other publishers by the end of the year.

Both Google and Yahoo have hundreds of thousands of advertisers who bid to associate their small text advertisements with certain terms on Internet searches. Two years ago, Google reached out to publishers - mainstream media companies and bloggers alike - with technology that can analyze the content on a given page to select related ads. [Read the rest]