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So it's Thursday and that puts the weekend just two days away ... now if only I can last for those two days.

Yep, that's what it's been like around here this week. We started the week off with a Tropical Cyclone that really didn't know where it was going and seemed ready to do a few donuts before it made up its mind ... so it had us running around in circles too. Fortunately it finally turned east and left us alone but not before it caused a lot of confusion and a lot of wasted time in preparing for it.

That put us way behind with several projects we're working on for clients and we've spent some early mornings and late nights trying to catch up. By 5am this morning we we're just about caught up and then in came some news that someone we have known and respected for some time has just gone to prison for credit card fraud.

That kind of took the wind out of our sails because it's such a waste. For just a couple of thousand bucks ... that's all he spent ... this guy has severely damaged the people whose credit card information he stole and totally destroyed his own life and, because he was running an online app that lots of people were using, he's caused some grief for a lot of other people too. Unfortunately the online app went offline as soon as word got out that he had been jailed.

And the really crazy part of it all was that he didn't have to do the crime at all ... he was in a well-paid job, he wasn't broke, he seemed to spend the money on stuff he didn't really need and it looks as though he just did it because he was in the position where he could.

Sometimes you just have to wonder about the makeup of people who will do something like that.

Well now that I've debriefed about that let's move on to other things and unfortunately the news doesn't get a whole lot better. Over the last couple of days I've been seeing a number of mainstream reports that suggest that online advertising is really taking a hit thanks to the financial problems the world is facing.

Some of the big sites that were built on a business model that relied on income from selling banner spots are beginning to find the going a whole lot tougher. Even some of the very popular social networking sites are beginning to find that regular advertisers are not booking spots anymore and only a few minutes I go I received an email from Stumbleupon trying to encourage me to do some more advertising on their site.

I'm also seeing several people who have very popular sites who have been using Adsense as their main source of site income saying that traffic is good but clicks and income are way down. Our experience has been that the amount of traffic going to our main Adsense sites has actually been up but income has dropped slightly.

It's hard to compare out Adsense sites with those of the people that I've just mentioned because we're in totally different verticals and I have a suspicion that some verticals are going to remain popular while others ... such as what might be considered luxury items in these tough times ... are going to be less popular than what they were back in the good times.

So if you're thinking of supplementing your online income with some extra money from mainstream Adsense sites then you may find that it will be a little harder to make money than it once was. Knowing which verticals are going to continue to be profitable might be a little tricky but perhaps one measure could be what advertisers are prepared to pay for clicks from those Adsense ads.

You can access tools on Google that will tell you what amounts advertisers are currently bidding for various keywords and you should monitor those over a period of a few weeks to see which keywords are holding their value and which ones are getting a little soft.

I would also suggest that you shouldn't take the value of a keyword as the main indicator that it will be profitable either. Instead watch to see whether a keyword drops in value or remains steady and it's the ones that remain steady that are possibly going to be the ones worth building sites for.

Of course that's just my take on the situation and in this crazy online world your mileage may be totally different to mine so don't take my word for anything. Instead get out there and test, test and test again and only make a decision based on what you see that works for you.

And now I'm off to do some more catching up so that maybe I will be able to take some time off over the weekend. I can already see Steve looking longingly towards the garage where he has a couple of projects he'd like to work on.