I logged into Google webmaster tools this morning and my shiny new blog is now verified. Google is at last now satisfied that I am the owner of a blog I created using the same email address that I had already used to login to Google webmaster central. Hooray! Isn't modern technology wonderful?

However the blog has still not yet been crawled. To help Google in this task I added a sitemap at this point. With a Blogger blog you can't generate a normal sitemap. Instead I clicked the "Add" button in the "Sitemap" column in the Webmaster tools dashboard, and entered the blog's atom feed URL (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com/atom.xml in this case). Given the apparent inability of Google's systems to talk to each other I'm beginning to wonder whether I should manually add the URL to Google's queue as a belt and braces measure. For now let's forget about that and wait and see what happens.

There is now a single, hopefully relevant, AdSense advertisement placed over on the top right of the page. The one showing at the moment is about an affiliate website. I guess that counts as relevant.

Then I went over to http://www.google.com/adsense and logged into my new AdSense account for the first time. It says in a large font at the top:

Today's Earnings: US$0.00

In smaller print next to that it says "Your payments are currently on hold. Action is required to release payment." Obviously we are currently nowhere near Google's $100 payment threshold, so we'll come back to sort that out later. It does seem like we're in desperate need of some traffic though.