You can find out all about Google's "AdSense" program by click on the link in that says "Ads by Goooooogle" (as opposed to clicking on the advertisement themselves), and then going into their policy page. What I want to point out right now is a clause that goes as follows:

Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content.

However, since someone asked about the ads, I suppose this is not really "undue" attention. Suffice it to say that I can't ask you guys to click on the ads, and if anyone posts a comment telling other users to click on an ad, I'll have to censor that. However, I suppose it's okay to explain how the program works in layman's terms, in case you wish to use Google Ads on your own site, and don't want to sift through all the legalese.

Apparently, Google scans my page to "guess" at the topic, and then tries to display ads relevant to the topic of the page. This process can actually take a few days, so at first, the ads may not seem to relevant, but they are supposed to improve over time. If Google cannot ascertain what the topic is at all, then it displays what they call "Public Service Ads" (you'll know them when you see them).

Google pays every time someone clicks on the ad. They do not pay just for displaying the ad. How much they pay, I'm not really sure, as I haven't had anyone click on an ad yet (and I'm not supposed to just click on my own ads to generate revenue). I don't want to frighten you away from click on the ads, but I can't ask you to click on them either. I've programmed the site to place automatically them immediately after the first paragraph of every entry. This is so that it occurs in the "above the fold", a term which means you don't have to scroll down before you see the ad, and also so that it actually is somewhere where you'll probably see it (as opposed to making the ad some sort of sidebar).

If the income from the ads do not outweight the negative reaction I receive from the ads, then I shall remove them, but you guys have to be pretty vocal about it, 'cause I can't guess at what you want.