Help Google AdSense Become Relevant

They should open this up wide open, in conjunction perhaps with a reasonable TOS. Seems to me that there's a great deal to be learned by comparing what adsense thinks it should be displaying on a page compared to what a human editor (site owner) thinks is relevant to the site visitors.

Something other than what ads pay the most I would hope.

This is not a beta, but a feature for Premium publishers. It will likely never be opened to the general public, because of the extreme level of trust required for such a feature, and the fact that so many website owners could never maintain that trust.

I do think that there's ways to carve out the part of the page that you want to base the targeting on. I talked about it a bit for that Performancing interview. Ah, here it is:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

So you could make sure to target only your blog post content, thereby avoiding the "bloggish" words on a page..

Yeah, I've never had good results with section targeting. But its better than nothing.

I can't believe this person just blurted out about hints as the AdSense reps don't want to be deluged about them, supposed to keep your mouth shut if you get 'em, but they work GREAT!

From what I've read google_hints have been around a long time, actually might've been an active part of the original AdSense feature set that anyone could use, if they knew about it, but some people started abusing it so Google disabled it and only turn it on case by case now.

And that's all the hints about hints you'll get from me, since the cat is already out of the bag.

I think you're right IncrediBILL, I remember this story back in June?