Starting today, Microsoft (MSFT) plans to actually pay users to search via Bing. Yes, you read that correctly - they will PAY you, in cash, to use Bing rather than some other search engine such as Yahoo (YHOO), or more likely Google (GOOG). How will they do this? When you shop online through the Bing search engine, Microsoft will refund you a portion of your purchase price at its own expense. Okay, they have actually been doing this for a while, but starting today they will double that amount to up to 50% of your purchase price. That’s worth taking notice.

In practice, this concept isn’t entirely new. Many e-commerce sites have affiliate programs which will pay a third party site (like Bing) for referring customers to them. Microsoft’s search engine has taken advantage of this by combining its search engine capabilities with various affiliate programs. When a buyer searches for an item on Bing and then purchases it, Microsoft gets paid a commission for the referral. There are many sites that do this, but Microsoft is the only one that refunds 100% of this commission back to its users. For more on this, read my last article on Microsoft’s Bing.com (formerly Live.com) here. As you can see from the article, Microsoft has dabbled with paying users out of pocket to shop via Bing in the past. Previously, they have offered similar promotional discounts to specific stores like eBay (EBAY). In that instance, users received up to 30-35% cashback for making their eBay purchases through Bing. But with this promotion, they will double the cashback on ALL affiliate stores, up to 50%!

For the last few years Nintendo (NTDOY.PK) has enjoyed undisputed dominance in the video game industry. Sales of the Wii game console have outsold its competitors, Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox 360 and Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3. It's no secret, but true gaming sophisticates have known for a while that the Wii is actually inferior to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 which both have better graphics and gaming engines.

The games are considered inferior as well. According to a recent issue of Electronics Gaming Monthly, most of the best selling games are not from Nintendo. They scored some big winners with games like Mario Galaxy and Wii Fit, but most on the best selling list are for competing consoles.

This week Seeking Alpha passed another exciting milestone as we have now published articles from over 3000 contributing authors. As Director of Contributor Relations, I would like to take a moment to give a special welcome to our 3000th author, William Smead.

William is the founder of Smead Capital Management, where he oversees all activities of the firm. As Chief Investment Officer he is responsible for all investment and portfolio decisions as well as reviewing the implementation of those decisions.

Many will remember that back on January 16, 2009 Circuit City announced it was closing all of its stores. With Circuit City’s demise, it was clear that the economic collapse had claimed another victim and a big one at that. But I see that Circuit City is apparently back and has the Circuitcity.com website open and ready for business.

I used to spend a lot of time on eBay (EBAY), but haven’t in quite a while. So I found myself rather surprised when I purchased nearly all of my holidays gifts on eBay last night. What caused this unexpected departure? An unlikely deal between eBay and Microsoft (MSFT) in which Microsoft will actually pay me to shop on eBay.

How much will they pay me? At first they advertised 10% of my purchase price in a cash back rebate, then I noticed it went up to 25%, and last night it was a whopping 30%! That’s pretty impressive and enough to get even a busy guy like me on eBay’s site for several hours checking out possible gift ideas.

The airline industry is not a good place to be these days. In general, I think it is one of the more risky investments. Unexpected airline tragedies can have a swift and dramatic affect while the troubled economy and rising costs, fuel in particular, make it virtually (but not completely) impossible for any to remain profitable.

Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings (AAWW) is in a slightly different category in that they primarily transport cargo, not people. Therefore their revenues aren’t affected nearly to the degree of commercial airlines in the case of tragedies. Unless, of course, there is a catastrophe that would result in the FAA restricting all air space as it did on September 11, 2001. During that period, Atlas’ planes were grounded along with every other airline, resulting in a significant loss of revenues.

I was surprised to notice how silent Amazon (AMZN) appeared to be vis-à-vis New York’s new tax law during the company's earnings call yesterday. Thomas Szkutak, Amazon’s Senior VP & CFO, brushed off questions regarding the tax issue as “too early to comment.” By contrast, in Overstock’s (OSTK) latest Q2 2008 earnings call transcript, the company had much to say about the issue. What really caught my attention was when Jonathan Johnson, Overstock’s SVP, stated that the New York State Senate had voted to repeal New York’s most recent tax law which would put this whole mess behind us.

For those of you who weren’t aware, New York State passed a new law that went into effect on June 1, 2008. The law, dubbed “the Amazon tax,” requires all internet companies with affiliates in NY State to charge sales tax on shipments bound for New York. The State expects this to increase tax revenue by $50 million.