Month: December 2008

CJ Holiday Shopping Numbers

Ashley from CJ wrote and wanted to pass the word about some of the recent positive trends CJ is seeing this holiday shopping season as number continue to roll in:

Below is Commission Junction’s same store retail sales growth for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in comparison to comScore’s recent announcement on e-commerce spending.

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Nice job to the affiliate marketers, merchants and CJ who contributed!

Google and Twitter Hookup: Beautiful Babies Created

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Google’s Friend Connect (see the sidebar if you haven’t joined this site already) is now integrating with the Twitter login:

Official Google Blog: @Twitter: Welcome to Google Friend Connect: “To help you and your Twitter network stay connected no matter where you are on the web, we’re excited to announce that Google Friend Connect has integrated with Twitter. This means that when you join a Friend Connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile, discover people you follow on Twitter who are also members of the site, and quickly tweet that you have found a cool website.”

This is beyond fascinating to me. We will definitely see more convergence of this type as Google and Facebook continue to battle it out to see who will own your online (offline?) profile.

If Google and Twitter are in bed together, they definitely get my vote since my soul was sold to both of them years ago.

Give it a go over in the sidebar (and if you’ve already joined CPN through Friend Connect, you can hit the settings to play with the Twitter integration).

Calacanis and Affiliate Spam 2.0

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Last year Jason Calacanis gave the keynote at Affiliate Summit and made the point (if I may summarize) that affiliate marketers are bright and have lots of potential but think too small…instead they need to make quality platforms that people and VC’s will get behind.

Clearly, that mindset should have changed as the economy continues to dive bomb and the Silicon Valley companies (such as Calacanis’ VC backed Mahalo) that Jason lauded continue to make double digit percentage staff cuts in the name of runway to survive the long recession/depression that we’re in for.

However, I’m listening to the new This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte, which features Jason Calacanis, John C. Dvorak (drink!) and Sarah Lane. Listen to the first 15 or so minutes if you’re interested in how much Jason’s views haven’t changed over the last year regarding affiliate sites being equatable to parked pages and spam.

Look, I hate spam as much, if not more, than the next guy. Just follow me on Twitter if you’d like to see an affiliate marketer filled with self-angst over the spam problem. I recognize that some “affiliates” use tactics that suck and should be looked down upon. But that is not the majority of affiliates considering that “affiliate marketing” itself is mushrooming to encompass a whole range of publishers because of the evolution of the social web.

However, an outsider calling all affiliate sites spam for his own business gain is just lame considering Mahalo itself is an affiliate site. I guess the Valley way to eliminate competition is to call it spam.

Good luck with those runways, Jason. We’ll keep the traffic flowing in the control tower.

Faith Without Reason

thomaswhitley:

This morning at my church some of our children sang and some read lines. The performance was…well, it was a performance. Part of the dialogue stuck out to me, though.

Child 1: How could the creator of the world love me that much? I just can’t wrap my head around it.

Child 2: Thankfully, you don’t have to. You just have to wrap your heart around it.

This says to me that faith isn’t rational, that reason should not be considered when it comes to matters of faith.Should we not, though, be required to give some reason for our belief? I’m know that many will say that if you can give reasons for it, then it isn’t faith. To those, I would offer that maybe our definition of faith should be reconsidered.

W. K. Clifford says that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief”)

It occurs to me that this time of year is an exceptional time to ask this question as many people across our country are either gearing up to celebrate their special holiday (be it Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) or are already thick in celebration. What we celebrate largely depends on what we believe, but where do our beliefs come from? Have we just accepted what others have told us to believe? Have we examined our reasons for believing? Should we even worry with reasons?

What do you think?

Faith Without Reason

thomaswhitley:

This morning at my church some of our children sang and some read lines. The performance was…well, it was a performance. Part of the dialogue stuck out to me, though.

Child 1: How could the creator of the world love me that much? I just can’t wrap my head around it.

Child 2: Thankfully, you don’t have to. You just have to wrap your heart around it.

This says to me that faith isn’t rational, that reason should not be considered when it comes to matters of faith.Should we not, though, be required to give some reason for our belief? I’m know that many will say that if you can give reasons for it, then it isn’t faith. To those, I would offer that maybe our definition of faith should be reconsidered.

W. K. Clifford says that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief”)

It occurs to me that this time of year is an exceptional time to ask this question as many people across our country are either gearing up to celebrate their special holiday (be it Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) or are already thick in celebration. What we celebrate largely depends on what we believe, but where do our beliefs come from? Have we just accepted what others have told us to believe? Have we examined our reasons for believing? Should we even worry with reasons?

What do you think?

MyBlogLog’s Failure and the Problem with Marketers

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My pal Angel Djambazov of ReveNews has a great post on his frustrations with the MyBlogLog platform and its incessant spam problem.

I offer up a few thoughts about why and how this could be resolved in the comments there (basically, the model of MBL is flawed and that’s why Twitter is the winner).

Some from Angel:

MyBlogLog Needs to Wake Up Their Porn Problem | ReveNews: “MyBlogLog has all the elements of a really great tool. Blog owners, especially those whose content is more news orientated, will find the oversight that allows these spammers in as a poor reflection on their community.

Yahoo needs to realize that in certain cases a picture can equal a thousand words of spam. Until then actual readers can get their news and their g-string pictures at the same time.”

And some from me:

“That’s why I think Twitter and the platforms that have been made popular since MBL was sold to Yahoo back in ‘07 have done so well (especially for those of us in the marketing space)… it’s the publisher or user who gets to be the gatekeeper and fend off the spammers as they arise. The follow/no-follow/block paradigm is much better than the wild-west mentality of MBL.”

Good convo going on there… head over to ReveNews and add some of your thoughts.