All Googlers have a free $1/day-budget AdWords account to play with.

It's actually a recommendation by SEM marketers to buy your co.'s...for brand reasons.

also...his competitors will buy his name...

I agree with Foogler on this. He is buying the ads for his blog because Google allows him $1 per day to buy ads.

I know this is kinda old, but err, here's Eric's response:
http://weblog.vedana.net/2007/09/me-and-adwords.html