Starting your own blog and building an audience is difficult, but you get to decide on the layout, design, branding, URL, topics, ad placements, etc., but if you write for someone else's blog you definitely don't keep all the money, and you probably don't have a lot of say over what ads to run, where they're placed, the name of your blog, the design, etc. They write not because they love the topic (because if they did, wouldn't they have already started their own blog?) but because they could make $50, $100, maybe a few hundred dollars per month.

Given recent coverage of Google’s new Finance portal , I hadn’t noticed that they’ve also begun to integrate their core search product with Google Base.
Then, clicking “search vehicles” takes you directly to Base. The Base integration described above is an assault on eBay and a number of vertical search firms; the Writely acquisition puts them closer to overlapping with Microsoft’s Office franchise; and, with Google Books , the company moves closer to Amazon.com.