SEO Max Your ROI Newsletter, 8th August 2005, p3

According to a post on ThreadWatch an email invitation from Google offers selected AdWords beta testers the opportunity to use up to 200 characters in the description field - up from the current limit of 70 characters - in a bid to improve click-through, Search Engine Lowdown reports (via Marketing Vox). The poster surmises that the move may presage "a concerted attack" on Yahoo's advertiser base - "After all, the extra chars were (IMO) one of Ys strongest differentiators from the AdWords product."
And a quote from the Google email: "We will alternate showing your regular ad text with the longer version of the text. We plan to experiment with slight layout variations of the longer ad text in order to determine which layout design will perform the best."

Yahoo! is gearing up to launch a local edition of its United States-based subscription service Music Unlimited by the end of the year, says Cliff Rosenberg, managing director Australia and NZ.
An exact launch date has yet to be finalised, but it may well beat the much-anticipated Australian version of Apple's iTunes Music Store, which remains in limbo months after initial reports of an April release date.
There are several commercial music download services already open for business in Australia, including Destra , ninemsn and BigPond Music.

Google, which apparently is going to sell AdWords in China through a distributor system, is catching flack from those distributors, who believe their 20% comission is too low.
According to Gwinnett Daily Online: Google has been actively expanding its presence in China over the last few months. The search engine giant set up its first China office in Shanghai in April of 2005 and has already entered into distribution agreements with three Chinese distributors for its ad services, namely Shanghai HotSales, Beijing-based ce.net.cn (http://www.ce.net.cn), Xiamen-based zzy.cn (http://www.zzy.cn), while negotiating with a fourth distributor, so far identified only as a Shenzhen-based company.
Each of these four distributors will be responsible for selling Google's ad services in specific geographical regions of Mainland China. Google, in return, will give them up to 20% of ad sales, plus up to 20% of services fees charged to ad buyers.

I believe the reason for the distributor structure is because Google is going with strict monthly pricing for ad sales in China, rather than pay-per-click. Google China calls it pay-for-performance, of P4P. AdWords is Google's branded pay-for-performance (P4P) advertising service that places relevant text-based ads both within Google and on external websites. Google's AdWords services cost between RMB 600 (USD 73.98) and RMB 3,000 (USD 369.91) per month for Chinese advertising clients, depending on traffic level.