Emerging Technology

Matt Haughey has a day job as a web designer, but in his spare time he nurtures a borderline obsessive relationship with his TiVo video recorder. So, mostly as a lark, he created a personal Web log (www.pvrblog.com), where he archives TiVo news and offers tips about what he has discovered on the Internet. The day after launching the blog in July 2003, Haughey signed up for an automated service called Google AdSense to run small text advertisements on the site. Each time one of his readers clicks on an ad, Google pays Haughey a small fee. “My goal was to cover the monthly cost of hosting the site—about $20,” he says.