Month: October 2007

Asheville, NC really is the most beautiful place in the world in October. Mountains, trees and lots of leaves…

“It’s a series of TUBESSSSS!”

But seriously, we Americans are a pretty frightening lot indeed:

To summarize: an alarming percentage of respondents are open to brain implants that allow them to access the internet with their minds and that allow their children’s locations to be tracked, they think government censorship of online video content is acceptable, the internet makes them feel closer to God and less close their significant others – but their own identities on the internet are not very important to them. This is frightening stuff…

More than half of respondents believe that internet content, like video, should be controlled in some way by the government. Only 36% said the blocking of internet video would be unconstitutional.

Wow.  I’m as apple pie American as anyone, but with thinking like that, it’s no wonder we elect clowns like Ted Stevens to represent us in Washington.

Somewhere Karl Rove is stroking a bald cat and thinking “exceeelent.”

Poll: US Attitudes About The Internet Are Insane

Um…

Wow, this is definitely not cool:

“I was checking out the natural search results for Affiliate Summit on Google, as I do regularly, and I was surprised at one of the paid ads that was triggered.

There was an ad for the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.”

There’s a general rule in the highly competitive affiliate space… don’t piss in the town well.  Looks like SES is definitely doing that by bidding on Affiliate Summit’s name.

That’s sleezy in my book and won’t win SES any fans (or attendees if they realize what’s going on).

Search Engine Strategies of SES

I’m incredibly excited that GMail now has IMAP.

Why? I’ve been a devoted GMail user since ’04 just after the launch and have gigs and gigs of emails and content locked up in GMail (bought extra storage to make due).  While GMail has always allowed for POP downloads, IMAP is different.

Here’s why… with IMAP, you can have a more seamless email experience because IMAP allows you to sync your email where ever you access it from.  So, for example you can interact with your email (read, label, etc) in Thunderbird or Outlook and see the changes in your GMail interface on the web.  POP access doesn’t allow for this. 

So, for those of us who prefer to keep webmail and offline mail nice and synced, this is a huge step forward for GMail.

There are even larger ramifications for people who have iPhones since the mail client there is heavily dependent on IMAP for sanity reasons. 

Thank you, Google.  You made my day.

Official Gmail Blog

According to my new ConvergeSouth pal Wayne Sutton, he’s seeing an IMAP option in his GMail account.

Oh please please please let this be true and spread quickly to my account!

Google’s Gmail has just integrated IMAP. However, its only appearing in a select accounts.

w4 network » Blog Archive » Gmail gets IMAP

Update: Looks like it’s official according to Techmeme! Hooray!

Update 2: I’ve got IMAP ON MY GMAIL!!

Sean Coon has a great post on the ability of laypersons (in this case musicians) to get their messages, voices and music out to an increasingly large number of folks from desirable demographics by leveraging web services and social platforms.

While Sean sticks to the music scene, his post certainly rings true for all of marketing (music is a form of marketing in my book) in general.

Recommended reading (especially if you like catchy diagrams):

What’s becoming obvious is that as more domains decide to make their APIs available in the public arena — to both independent developers and to the very same domains they compete with — our internet rapidly progresses from a linearly connective space to a multi-layered, inter-connected environment — more akin to a network — ripe with exposed hooks to latch onto and build upon.

The most powerful part of this equation? How about the fact that a great number of internet services — across numerous industries — have evolved to a point where Joe Layman can now leverage our internet’s many to many power of connectivity and discovery, yet never have to bust out one line of code in the process of doing so.

the dotmatrix project

Yahoo’s redirection of links and its “Paid Inclusion” platform is nothing new or newsworthy. However, it’s always a good thing to shine a light on the process of how affiliate links are treated by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) in order to understand where the affiliate industry stands in its attempt to gain mainstream understanding.

Clearly, we in the affiliate marketing industry need to do more in the way of outreach and general education initiatives to let companies and individuals understand how the industry works and how concepts like affiliate links should interact with search engines.

In other words, not much new here.

(Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for the link):

If you search on Yahoo, all of their organic results (not the sponsored links) are redirected through http://rds.yahoo.com. This is nothing new and they have been doing this for quite some time to record click metrics.

However, sometimes Yahoo gets sneaky and slips some affiliate links in those redirects. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a close look at the results for “cheap flights:”

Yahoo Is Dropping Affiliate Cookies

After having played around with my first Nokia device (the Nokia N800) for about a month now, I can say that Nokia makes some darn snappy gadgets. 

The N95 looks like the real JesusPhone to me, and the thought of bundling it as a utilitarian device for the purpose of mobile journalism opens all sorts of future doors…

The rise of the cameraphone has certainly changed the face of journalism, and old-guard wire service Reuters isn’t about to get passed by — the company has entered into a long-term partnership with Nokia to develop new mobile reporting technologies, and the two companies have recently completed trials of an N95-based “Mobile Journalism Tookit” that takes moblogging to a whole new level.

Engadget

I’ve been reworking to “rebrand” this site a bit as my homebase since I’m so scattered across the various social networks and places like ReveNews.

So, I wanted to give this place a little personality and spruce it up with a new look and feel.  I’m a big fan of white space in design as you can probably tell.

Let me know if you see any bugs or have any problems!

Sam Harrelson