Product placement is getting more subtle, and you can do it yourself.

A company called PayPerPost will pay bloggers to write articles about particular topics and link to particular advertisers' sites.

I hereby promise that Status-Q will never stoop so low!

Toni Schneider signed up and reported back. Extract:

I opened an account, scanned their offers from advertisers and picked one more or less at random. It was from a site called WeddingStrategies. They offered me $10 for writing a blog post about them with at least 300 words. Their instructions included ""title needs to include keyword wedding or weddings, PR3 please, no business blogs, no mention of PayPerPost."" That last bit certainly was revealing.

'PR3', in case you don't know (I didn't) is a measure of your popularity on Google's Page Rank algorithm. You can check it here. This blog is PR6, I gather - perhaps I should be trying to profit from that!