Month: November 2008

AIM Mail Widgets: Webmail Finally Growing Up

I logged into my AIM mail account today. That’s not something I do frequently. However, if these new widgets I found waiting for me are any indication of future development, I may be giving AIM (how about AOL Mail?) a second look.

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AOL is famous for having been a walled-garden portal in the past. However, as I wrote last week, AOL is really on the ball with the whole spirit of the open web by introducing ways to bring in content from such places (competitors?) as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc on the main AOL homepage, which does millions of impressions every month.

And the results from this newfound embracing of openness are more engagement, more pageviews and more attention. AOL is on to something.

With these new widgets in AIM mail, you can integrate Yahoo Mail, contacts, AIM, AOL Finance, Mapquest, etc within your inbox. GMail has this same feature with its Labs platform, so it’s good to see competition there. The trick with AIM is that they are bringing in properties from outside the AOL universe (unless the AIM Mail team knows something about a Yahoo/AOL deal that we don’t). Nifty.

However, my main question is if this is a sign of the future? Will you eventually be able to update Twitter or your Facebook status (or send Facebook messages) within AIM or AOL mail as you can on the AOL home page? If so, that will be very compelling. Will I ditch GMail for AIM even if that happens? Perhaps not, but I will definitely take a second look at my AOL/AIM mail.

It’s time for web-based email clients to grow up and become platforms instead of proprietary gardens of in-house developers. I’m glad to see AOL is helping to make that happen.

Pepperjam is the Network for Comic and SciFi Geeks

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Comics were a huge part of my dorky teen years (but I only read the cool comics that you had to ask for from behind the counter). I still have soft spot in my heart for all things Marvel, DC, Image, Darkhorse, etc.

So, I was excited to see that Pepperjam now has the Marvel affiliate program in their network. Pepperjam also has the Star Trek affiliate program, making it a nostalgic choice for fanboi’s and geeks who, like myself, appreciate the finer things from Jim Lee or Frank Miller. Come to think of it, they also have MGM (Stargate) and Warner Bro’s (DC merchandise, Batman, Harry Potter and 300). Lots of geek cred there.

The Marvel program has 45 day cookies and starts at 7% and works up to 10% with volume. There is supposedly a datafeed on the way as well.

I’ll definitely be checking that one out for Christmas since Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk were such big hits this year and there is always a crowd hungry for X Men and Spiderman goodness (plus there’s the upcoming Wolverine and Avengers movies in the works).

Good stuff.

Marvel Launches Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network

Google Makes Blackberry’s Usable (and Enjoyable)

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I admit it. I still have a Blackberry instead of an iPhone. And I love my Blackberry (and so does my 1 year old daughter). It doesn’t help that I’ve sold my soul to Verizon and AT&T has poor coverage in this area of Western North Carolina. I have an iTouch, so don’t take away my geek cred.

However, things such as Google Sync and the GMail app make having a Blackberry beyond bearable and actually enjoyable. The ability to sync Google Calendar with my Blackberry’s Calendar over the air is tremendous.

And now there is an impressive new update to Google Sync that also allows you to sync your Blackberry’s contact manager with your GMail contacts. Sweetness:

Official Google Mobile Blog: Google Sync for BlackBerry: Now with contacts: “You asked for it, so here it is. We’re happy to announce that in the latest update to Google Sync for BlackBerry, we’ve added two-way contacts synchronization. This new functionality will enable you to sync your handheld’s built-in address book with your Gmail contacts. This all happens in the background and over the air, so your information is always up to date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”

Now I can sync my calendar, contacts, mail and to do list (via Remember The Milk’s awesome RSync Blackberry app) over the air. Not to mention I can check Google Docs, Google Reader and Evernote all from my device.

All of a sudden my Blackberry just became a complete cloud computer.

Messianic Ethics?

John Howard Yoder’s still influential The Politics of Jesus
continues to evoke responses from a variety of angles within the large umbrella of “religious studies.”

While I’m most familiar with the historical responses to Yoder, here is an interesting piece on the possible ethical implications of Yoder’s work on politics and early followers of Jesus (and Jesus himself):

(Thanks to my advisor/teacher/mentor/friend/provacateur Prof Goodman for sending over…)

Is a Messianic Ethic Possible: Recent Work By and About John Howard Yoder http://documents.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=4617204&access_key=key-2a430n4jkgsokb4zegf3&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Is a Messianic Ethic Possible: Recent Work By and About John Howard Yoder

iPhone and Touch Apps for Parents

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I’ve been doing lots of daddy day care for my 1 year old daughter this week, so this a topic definitely on my mind…

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): “Baby Monitor Did you forget to bring Jr.’s monitor to Grandma’s house? Put your iPhone next to his crib and launch Baby Monitor. When he starts to wail like a banshee, Baby Monitor calls a pre-determined number, like Grandma’s landline. Baby Monitor costs $0.99US.”

Nifty!

AOL Opening Up to Growth

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Bill Wilson, AOL’s EVP of Programming, emailed me a followup to my post on AOL’s recent successes to let me know that the new comScore Media Metrix reports were out.

AOL had significant growth both in the passive page view metric as well as the more active attention metrics. New visitors and users were also both up 9% this year over last.

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The corporate press release with all of its statistical goodness can be found here:

AOL Sites Hit Record Audience Reach and Engagement in October | AOL Corporate: “AOL programming sites hit all-time high traffic numbers and marked the 21st month of consecutive year-over-year growth for unique visitors, according to the October 2008 comScore Media Metrix report. Unique visitors to AOL’s programming content sites grew 7% year-over-year to 54.3 million in October, and page views more than doubled, up 101% year-over-year to 4.2 billion. Engagement (total minutes) grew 51% year-over-year in October. Total minutes reached an all-time high on AOL.com, http://aol.com, growing 27% year-over-year. Additionally, AOL.com page views grew 27%, and unique visitors and total visitors were up 9%, year-over-year, as the site further opened up to third-party content, services and features. In addition, AOL Webmail, http://mail.aol.com, reached an all-time high of 3.5 billion page views marking a 31% year-over-year growth. “

As I wrote in my post last week, AOL is on the right path with their decision to open up and allow existing and new users to leverage the AOL.com homepage as their home base for the web. We’ve recently seen Yahoo and just this week Microsoft’s Live.com follow in similar paths as well as Google with the iGoogle platform.

I don’t think we’re in a return phase of the “power of the portal,” but we are seeing the metaphor of the portal being expanded to encompass social media and social networks and real time (AIM) data deliverability and consumption.

Pay attention to AOL and Platform-A.

Loa Power Tools: Haven’t Heard of It? You Will

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I frequently mention Loa Power Tools on podcasts, but I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about it.

I’ve been a subscriber for the last six months or so and I can’t tell you how frequently Loa saves my rear when trying to send an email from a wifi hotspot, airport, university building, etc that doesn’t want to work well with my email client.

Or if you have an AT&T DSL line at your office space like I do, you know the frustration of trying to send out through an SMTP other than AT&T’s designated one. Loa solves that.

Yes, I do love and use GMail, but there’s the whole business aspect of not looking professional when you have the “sent from GMail on behalf of CostPerNews.com” in the header. Sure, I could go with Google Apps, but I’ve got 4 years of mail archived in my personal GMail account. Loa solves a huge problem there as well (and there’s a special plan for GMail users).

And that’s why I like Loa Power Tools. It’s a problem solving application for power email users that you don’t notice running in the background because it does what it needs to do quietly.

Just thought I’d plug the service (no, this is not a paid advertisement, I’m just a fan) because it’s an unsung hero of my daily work flow. Go read more and give it a shot if you need this sort of a solution (and who doesn’t with the ubiquity of wifi hotspots these days?)…

Tell me more about Loa PowerTools: “Loa PowerTools is a tiny utility that lets you send email from any internet connection anywhere. Once it is installed, you don’t have to change your life at all. You can use whatever email software you prefer: Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird … it doesn’t matter, but Loa PowerTools will send your mail out through the Internet in a way that can’t be stopped by any but the most aggressive firewalls. And by ‘aggressive’ we mean firewalls in secure places where you wouldn’t expect to be able to have much Internet contact with the outside world.

It’s particularly useful for laptops. Without Loa PowerTools, when you travel from connection to connection, you never know what mail server to use to send mail. You often have to spend a lot of time fumbling around to find the address of an SMTP server that will let you connect. Even if you can find one that would let you connect, more and more often these days the network you use won’t allow any mail at all. The provider of the connection deliberately blocks all outward-bound mail. The detective work you have to do is exhausting and often fruitless! You never know from one trip to the next whether you will be able to send email when you are at your destination hotel, in a conference room or an airport lounge or using some other publicly available network. And as the number of malicious exploits around the Web increases, the problem is only getting worse: network operators are being forced to become more and more protective of their networks.”

Plus, they take PayPal. Can’t beat that. Tell ’em uncle Sam sent ya.

BeatMyPrice.com: Interesting Affiliate Model

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The new rage for some of the shopping-centric affiliates and publishers is crowd source comparisons. Looks like BeatMyPrice.com is doing well with the model.

There is a nifty ajax interface, lots of options and the inevitable selling feature of the “deal feel.”

People Powered Price Comparison » BeatMyPrice.com

1. Find the best price you can online

2. Visit beatmyprice.com

3. Enter the details

4. See if someone has found it cheaper elsewhere

5. Save! (otherwise your price becomes the one to beat)

I expect to see more and more of these as the deal space heats up with the faltering economy.

AppScout also has some info on the site.

Microsoft Cashback Doing Something Right

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Say what you’d like about Microsoft Cashback, but they seem to be getting the numbers right…

Microsoft Cashback: The Traffic Needle Is Still Stuck, But The Ads Are Rolling In: “Microsoft is reporting that according to Comscore, Live Search referred 12% of all commercial transactions across the web – a number that is much smaller than Google’s referral share, but one that is also significantly larger than Live Search’s market share, which hovered around 9% during the same period. This makes the Live Search user base very appealing to advertisers, as it shows that they’re more likely to purchase goods than their Google counterparts.”

I’m still not sold on the long term veracity of the program since Microsoft faces two serious challenges to Cashback if it is going to be seen as a reliable income stream: 1) affiliates doing this are smarter, more nimble and will eat into Cashback’s market share little by little every month 2) this won’t get (or sustain) the “Oprah crowd” that makes cashback sites successful because the lack of a community and/or branding for that purpose (I’m not being a Microsoft hater… just saying).

Still, the numbers are impressive. Glad to see Microsoft using Jellyfish for it’s potential and perhaps this will spur more companies into investigating the direct response space as the economy continues to stumble around like a stoned hippy at a Grateful Dead show.

Thunderbird’s Affiliate Program


www.spreadthunderbird.com

Mozilla is best known for Firefox, but for fans of open source, sanity and alternatives to Outlook (or Evolution on Ubuntu), Thunderbird is a popular choice.

And now Thunderbird has an affiliate program to spread the good word (although you get points and pride, not cash… so it’s more for the fanboi’s than the serious affiliate business person).

Affiliates Home | Mozilla Thunderbird – Reclaim Your Inbox | Mozilla Thunderbird – Reclaim Your Inbox: “SpreadThunderbird offers a simple affiliates program (Beta) that enables members to support Thunderbird and earn fame and prizes.

SpreadThunderbird’s Affiliate Program is not the only program to help drive Thunderbird downloads.

We’re also interested in seeing more of these kinds of affiliate programs and if you’re interested in starting a similar program, please contact us”

I’m glad to see something like this, even if it is geared towards the diehards and fans.

I’ve been an off and on user of Thunderbird over the past few years and it is a viable competitor to Apple Mail or Outlook. While it doesn’t have native support on these platforms, the features often outweigh those costs.

Southern Baptists Show Us the Door

The Baptist State Convention is this week and it looks like the Southern Baptists have moved to put up more walls along with border with us Cooperative Baptists.

As a member of the CBF, I don’t have a problem with not finding approval from my more conservative Baptist kinfolk, but it is a shame that we can’t find common ground over the cacophony of politics.

I’m sure Jesus is proud.

NC So. Baptists cut ties with Coop. Baptist Fellowship | CITIZEN-TIMES.com | Asheville Citizen-Times: “The Greensboro News & Record reports that delegates to the 2008 Baptist State Convention in Greensboro have voted to remove the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship from a list of giving options for mission work.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was established as an alternative to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention. The group does not support the belief that the Bible is entirely without error, and the cooperative is willing to partner with churches that put gays into leadership roles.

Matt Williamson, pastor of Oak Forest Baptist Church in Fletcher, offered the proposal and said liberal theology will lead to liberal morality.

Remind me to not go to Oak Forest since I’ll infect them with my “liberal morality.”

Amazon Updates Deals Widgets

Amazon continues to make interesting and noteworthy improvements to its associates program. I wrote off the ability make any money with Amazon a few years back because of my own lack of success with their offerings on my affiliate sites.

However, I’ve been using Amazon more and more with great results on click-thru’s. They have so many options for affiliates and publishers (esp in niche categories that aren’t serviced well by traditional affiliate networks (which is a funny term to use since Amazon had an early affiliates program…but I digress).

If you haven’t given Amazon a shot in a while, you might want to reconsider.

Here’s an email sent out to associates/publishers this morning with details on new Deals widgets:

Dear Amazon Associate:

As you’re gearing up for the holiday season, don’t miss out on the new and improved Deals Widget. Now you can display the hottest deals from Amazon on your web page. The Deals Widget lets your users browse discounted items and ongoing promotions from the Amazon.com product category of your choice.

The new widget lets you display the deals most relevant to your website to improve customer retention and conversion.

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Deals by Category
You can now configure the widget to display discounted items and promotions from any Amazon.com category of your choice! Simply use the drop down to select a specific category and we’ll keep the widget updated with the latest deals from that category. Remember that your viewers are more likely to click through a widget when the deals are relevant to the theme and topic of your site. You can now use the ‘Deals by Category’ feature to place relevant Amazon deals throughout your site.

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Gold Box Deals
You can continue to display Gold Box deals using the Deals Widget. Gold Box deals are limited quantity offers that run for a specified time. The Gold Box deals widget lets your viewers browse through the latest Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and Our Best Deals.

Multiple Sizes
The Deals Widget is available in a variety of standard sizes and can be placed anywhere on your site. Available sizes include: Sidebar (120×400, 160×400), Large (250×250, 300×250, 336×280) and Banner (468×60, 728×90).

Create a Deals Widget in just a few clicks. If you want to display a list of handpicked products, be sure to try out the My Favorites, Carousel, and Slideshow widgets.

If you have any questions or feedback on this feature or the Associates Program, please contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

Early Gospel of John Fragment Could Be Yours!

… for the low low price of 200,000-300,000 GBP.

Early third century, folks. That’s early. And beyond important for the history of Christianity and understanding how the fourth gospel got to be in its “final” state and what that process might have included (and excluded).

If only I were rich, this would be a part of the Wofford collection…

Written almost certainly in Alexandria, and used in the important early Christian community at Oxyrhynchus, in the desert west of the Nile about 120 miles from Cairo, partly covered now by the modern village of Behnesa. Ancient Oxyrhynchus was principally discovered Bernard Grenfell (1869-1926) and Arthur Hunt (1871-1934), both of Queen’s College, Oxford, who devoted their lives to excavating it. The site furnished many of the finest and most precious records of early Christianity ever found, including the sensational ‘Sayings of Jesus’ (later known as the ‘Gospel of Thomas’), as well as notable classical texts, including Pindar and Menander. The present fragment was recovered by Grenfell and Hunt on 28 September 1922, and it was classified as P. Oxy. 1780. Most of the Oxyrhynchus finds are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the British Museum. Some specimen pieces, however, were transferred by Oxford University to appropriate theological seminaries and colleges elsewhere, including the present piece which had been given by 1924 to the Baptist college, Crozer Theological Seminary, founded near Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1865. It was later the alma mater of Martin Luther King. In 1980 Crozer merged with the ecumenical Colgate Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York. The present manuscript was Inv. 8864 in the Ambrose Swasey Library in the combined Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, until their sale in our New York rooms, 20 June 2003, lot 97, $400,000, bought then by the present owner for what is still by far the highest price ever paid at public sale for any early Christian manuscript. Since 2004 it has toured American museums in the exhibitions Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book and Ink and Blood, where it has been seen by hundred of thousands of people. The bibliography below takes no account of the manuscript’s truly enormous presence now on Christian websites, DVDs and published videos.

GOSPEL OF JOHN, IN GREEK, LARGE FRAGMENT FROM A MANUSCRIPT CODEX ON PAPYRUS

Yahoo Gets Into the Performance Marketing Space

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Yahoo announces their Yahoo Deals platform:

Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Have I got a deal for you: “Retail isn’t all doom and gloom. While total spending may drop this season as consumers guard their net worth, Forrester Research predicts that online shopping will actually rise 12% over last year, mainly because half of online shoppers anticipate that the best values and deals will be found on the Web. And it goes without saying that they’ll also avoid the stress of crowded malls and long lines when they log on in their pajamas.”

Similar to Microsoft Cashback, the aim is to help consumers find the best deals for popular products.

Should be interesting to see how well they do with this…

The Valley Still Doesn’t Get Performance Marketing

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Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media (which is the umbrella for such wide-read and influential blogs as Lifehacker, i09 (one of my favs), Gawker, Valleywag, Fleshbot, etc) writes about the coming online advertising apocalypse…

Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: “Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it’s more ‘measurable’ than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector’s maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it’s still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer’s sales.”

What Denton and Calacanis, etc fail to come to grips with is that the model of ad welfare which has supported the Silicon Valley lifestyle and worldview over the last 5 years of web2.0 is not (and has never been) the reality of actionable advertising or marketing.

Despite Calacanis’ dire predictions of affiliate marketing’s irrelevancy at Affiliate Summit West ’08, there is a brighter future for the industry compared to what the Valley will have to endure in the coming years.

Welcome to reality. Have a seat. Enjoy the view.

You Got Your Basecamp in My GMail

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I talk about Basecamp a good deal here.

And there’s a good reason for that… it’s essential for web workers (which means all online marketers and/or entrepreneurs) as an end-all-be-all of productivity, project planning, organization, todo lists, whiteboards, etc.

Now, you can add your Basecamp projects to GMail via Periscope via Labs. I’ve tried it… it’s tremendous:

Gmail Gadgets: Add Your Basecamp Projects to Gmail: “To enable this gadget, you’ve got to have a Basecamp account with the API enabled, a Periscope account (which stores your Basecamp login information), and Gmail Labs’ Gadgets by external URL feature enabled. Got all that? Once you’re there, head to the Gadgets tab in Gmail and copy and paste the Periscope Basecamp Gadget URL in, and then your sidebar will display your Basecamp projects as pictured.”

Yes, my GMail tab looks like a crazy narcissist took over the place since I have my Calendar, Docs and Remember The Milk Gadgets going along with the occasional chat (I use GTalk within GMail for AIM and Google chat)…not to mention the steady deluge of email.

Nevertheless, I feel as if I’m getting somethings done with this approach.

“iPhone Apps are my Crack”

My pal Joe Magennis does a weekly podcast called “Overflow” with Cameron Watson and it’s a must listen if you’re into the tech/geek/marketing space.

This week is all about the iPhone App platform, but they do a great job of covering various topics:

iPhone Apps are my Crack | Overflow: “This week our topic is about the iPhone apps that we are using and how the device has changed our lives. “

We all need more podcasts to listen to, so add this one up to your queue along with GeekCast, GeekTo.Me and AffiliateThing.

Plus, the music on Overflow is A+ b/c of Joe’s excellent taste.

GeekTo.Me 7: Essential Geek Skills

geektome

Episode Seven: Macbook's Kill Switch, Token iPhone Discussions and Essential Geek Skills (about an hour)

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=Pb2e3acc9ba1f8b7cc1a808c9e1115191bF98QFREYmN8&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap24

MP3 File

Show Notes:

– Tethering
– More on iPhones and Blackberries
– Macbook Self Destruct Mode
– 50 Essential Geek Skills

In all honesty, this is the best GTM yet. Check it out and let us know what you think!

GeekTo.Me 7: Essential Geek Skills « GeekTo.Me

Jim Kukral Rebrands as TheBizWebCoach

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Jim Kukral, a veteran of the performance marketing world, MC of Affiliate Summit and serial entrepreneur, has rebranded himself as TheBizWebCoach and is writing a book called Blend This Book! about attention economics.

Hi, I’m Jim Kukral, The Biz Web Coach! I’m doing something different here. It’s revolutionary! I’m offering my 12+ years of experience and expertise in a new way, through Web coaching on a membership program.

Why?

Jim sees this as the future of business web coaching and understandably realizes that coaching is becoming a major niche for individuals with enough social capital and know-how to help businesses (and/or individuals looking to start them) in these troubled economic times.

It’s hard to explain the totality of what Jim is doing, but it is quite interesting. Beyond being a “business coach,” Jim rightly sees that experts are moving into the one-on-one type help situation (instead of ebooks, etc).

So, is membership the next big thing? I think it may be.

Hopefully, I’ll be doing a podcast with Jim in the next few days where we talk about his ideas and goals for the rebrand and where he sees this space going.

As a part-time consultant, I’m interested in hearing his thoughts and you should be too.