Blogging for money, one post at a time

LAS VEGAS--Angie Mecklenburg, a mother of four in Sutter, Ill., blogs about chickens, God, and her farm. For an estimated $15, she'll write about soy-wax candles for a marketer.

Over the last 18 months, Mecklenburg has kept up three blogs, the most popular being Ang's Chicken Coop, which has the tagline "a view of the world from the coop." With about 250 daily visitors to her sites, she said she manages to make as much as $1,200 a month, collecting fees from Google advertising and marketers who pay her to write about their products via the blog ad network iZea.

For example, iZea recently paid her about $15 to write about candles from the Maddison Avenue Candles Company. She also was paid to write a blog about the Christian movie The Last Sin Eater earlier this year.

"iZea sent me a synopsis and movie clip. I blogged it and then I went and saw it," Mecklenburg said at the BlogWorld conference and expo here, a three-day event for blog entrepreneurs and professionals. She said she loved the movie.

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

Gregory Halpern knows how to hype. Shares of his publicly held company, Circle Group Holdings, quadrupled in price early last year amid reports that its new fat substitute, Z-Trim, was being tested by Nestlé. As the stock spurted from $2 to $8.50, Halpern's 35% stake in the company he founded rose to $90 million. He put out 56 press releases last year.

Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008

Credit crunch? Recession risk? You'd never know it, judging by the frenzy of startup activity. In fact, it's a pretty good time to start a company. Generous payouts from Web 1.0 IPOs and more-recent acquisitions have given rise to a new generation of angel investors and venture capitalists. Plus, getting acquired by Google is an attractive and plausible exit strategy for many entrepreneurs. Those factors have combined to make a startup market almost as frothy as the dot-com bubble.

We say almost, because the spending is a bit less lavish than before, and because -- unlike 1999 -- many of the new crop of startups have real promise. Here are 10 pre-IPO, pre-acquisition companies worth watching in 2008.

Think Smart!

A man walked into a bank in New York City one day and asked for the loan officer.

He told the loan officer that he was going to Philippines on business for two weeks and needed to borrow $5,000. The bank officer told him that the bank would need some form of security for the loan.

Then the man handed over the keys to a new Ferrari parked on the street in front of the bank. He produced the title and everything checked out The loan officer agreed to accept the car as collateral for the loan.The bank’s president and its officers all enjoyed a good laugh at the guy for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral against a $5,000 loan.

An employee of the bank then drove the Ferrari into the bank’s underground garage and parked it there.Two weeks later, the guy returned, repaid the $5,000 and the interest, which came to $15.41.