Year: 2008

Amazon, Affiliates and Facebook

TechCrunch is reporting on a new set of Facebook Apps from Amazon.com. First, let me say that I absolutely love Amazon.com and it has changed how I buy everything from toilet paper to music (the DRM-free mp3 store kicks iTunes’ butt) to toys to electronic gear.

In no small way, that game changing is due to the feedback and product reviews from actual purchasers and users. They still make a big difference if I’m torn between two competing products. Even if I’m at a physical store like Best Buy, I’ll often browse to Amazon on my mobile and do some quick research on the fly before a purchase.

So, it would be killer if Amazon could or would integrate its associate program with this new Facebook app…

Amazon’s Latest Product Launch is a Couple of Facebook Apps: “Amazon has now officially joined the Facebook craze. It has launched two of its own Facebook applications: Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver shows your Amazon wishlist on your Facebook page. Of course, there are more than a dozen apps on Facebook that already let you do that, but only Amazon Giver lets your friends actually buy those gifts for you without leaving Facebook. Ah, distributed commerce. Your friends can also click on a recommendations tab that creates Amazon product recommendations based on interests reflected in your Facebook profile. So if you are ‘fan’ of The Killers, it might recommend one of the band’s CDs. If you are a ‘fan’ of a soccer page, it might recommend a soccer ball. It also provides recommendations for your friends, conveniently listed by closest birthday.”

Think it’ll happen? I’m not so sure, but this would be a very steady revenue stream for Amazon and influencers who use Amazon and Facebook.

I’m chalking this one up to a possible “affiliate marketing future” paradigm, even if it is the old skool Amazon program.

Hulu, Radioshift and the End of Scheduled Programming

I’ve been in the beta of Hulu for the last few months, and I have to say that I’m loving the service. New shows, old shows, rather new movies and old movies…. fantastic.

Between this, bittorrent, Joost (they are carrying March Madness live this year) and Apple’s iTunes movie rental service and ability to download Lost, I’m seriously considering canceling cable. Now if Nascar would only go online…

Here’s a clip from The Jerk, which I’m watching now:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/HsIOWOOx6OKr1bnfM0uNjg

The ability to share, create a profile and embed stuff from Hulu is really nice and will help with the adoption. I just wonder if they’ll keep that around since I could basically just embed entire movies here.

The age of having to watch or listen to a program at a certain time is over. I rarely listen to FM music anymore with my ever growing collection of music and iPod. I do have a thing for AM radio, but there’s a great app for the Mac called Radioshift which allows you to rip AM from the stream. Add to that the two dozen or so podcasts that I actively listen to and I just don’t have the time or need for scheduled programming.

Amazing times we live in, folks.

8 Random Things About Sam Harrelson

James Omdahl asked me to take part in the “8 Random Things About Me” meme. Although I hate these memes, I like James so I’ll play along.

1. I cut my finger off just before I entered 9th grade. I was on a boating trip with my parents the weekend before school started and got my hand caught between the edge of the boat and the dock when another boat sped by and knocked our boat against the dock. I got my left hand out in time, but my right hand wasn’t fast enough. I ended up slicing off the end of my ring finger (from the top knuckle up) and crushing my other fingers. We actually saved the finger and it got re-attached. However, I have no feeling in it, so typing “L’s” and “O’s” on a keyboard is a pain.

2. Speaking of fingers, I can bend my pinky fingers all the way back. I have a rare condition called Ehlor’s Danlos that results in “hypermobility.” Basically, I’m like Rubber Band Man.

3. I love scifi book and movies. I’m reading 5 or 6 scifi books at anytime. Edgar Rice Burroughs (Martian Tales and Tarzan) is my favorite author. I’m also a huge Robert Heinlein fan. Science fiction is the last bastion of theology and philosophy in this post-modern age.

4. I’m working towards a PhD in Assyriology. I should be finished by now, but I started the program at Yale in 2000 and moved back to SC with my wife in 2002 so that she could attend medical school. Looks like I’ll be finishing around 2050 or so at this rate. I did, however, get a book published by Yale Press on Assyriology in 2006 called Asia Has Claims Upon New England. I was proud.

5. I met Ravi Shankar at an Anoushka Shankar concert in Newberry, SC a few years ago. I’ve never shaken hands with someone so awe-inspiring.

6. I want to be a teacher. I’ve been an 8th grade Science teacher and a Religious Studies Prof at a small univ in NC. Both were great experiences but I realized that you can be a teacher in whatever capacity you serve… even in marketing.

7. Macaroni and cheese (Kraft out of the box with way too much pepper and skim milk) is my favorite food.

8. When I graduated college with a Religion degree, I had every intention of becoming a minister (did the Pre-Ministerial club and everything) because of my experience in the AmeriCorps. I went to seminary for two years and realized that I was a heretic and got out with a master’s degree in Religion and Ancient Art. Jesus still loves me (I think).

Thanks for the nod, James… that ended up being more fun than I thought it would be.

Say It Ain’t So, Twitter

I’ve said over and over that I hope Twitter doesn’t go down the route of being acquired by Micro/Hoo/Goo. Even an ad deal with one of them seems a little troublesome to me (but it’s a business, so they’ve got to pay the bills).

I think Twitter has the potential to become a platform to compliment pop3 or IMAP with open 2 way API’s.

Yahoo & Twitter Ad Partnership in the Works?: “I just signed up for a new Twitter account today and my first Twitter generated friend was Yahoo! or Yahoo Search Marketing’s YahooAdBuzz Twitter profile…”

This probably doesn’t hint at anything substantive, but it does make me nervous.

“thought leaders: leading with thoughts.”

“thought leaders: leading with thoughts.”

merlin mann is a presentation genius and all around excellent guy to learn from. it amazes me that his pitch in this video is the same one i’ve seen (but in earnest) dozens of times at conferences.

i need to get better at my own presentation style. following matt webb and merlin recently has really prodded me to develop a more eclectic style that allows what i’m trying to communicate to get out there while also being a little different from the pack.

or something like that. 

“thought leaders: leading with thoughts.”

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/28376117

merlin mann is a presentation genius and all around excellent guy to learn from. it amazes me that his pitch in this video is the same one i’ve seen (but in earnest) dozens of times at conferences.

i need to get better at my own presentation style. following matt webb and merlin recently has really prodded me to develop a more eclectic style that allows what i’m trying to communicate to get out there while also being a little different from the pack.

or something like that. 

Wayne Porter Convo Podcast

Wayne Porter and I did a podcast last night where we discussed exactly what "next-gen" marketing means with practical examples, ideas and implementations.

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=P5fe993d40c264698169764f74736cf03Yl9wRVREYmR3&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap21

MP3 File

The podcast runs about 90 minutes and we discuss Wayne’s conception of Next Gen marketing and possible futures of online and affiliate marketing.

It’s not a podcast for everyone, but if you’re willing to think a little deeper, there’s a ton of value in here.

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

having complete deja vu. i wonder, if lost is correct, and we are all time shifting back and forth in search of “constants” that will keep us anchored in one time frame or another.

given that our small human brain has no real conception of the grand scale of time/space and the other three dimensions, it’s possible that we’ve got this whole timeline thing wrong.

i hope so.

Untitled

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light Cone RSS

Light Cone RSS

“From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it – this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone. Today… My light cone contains 46 stars. HR4523 will be reached in in 4 weeks.

(Data taken from the utterly excellent An Atlas of the Universe, which has maps from the solar system out to the the Local Group and beyond. There’s a lovely 3d map of stars within 50 light years, the data from which is used here. If you have data for beyond 50 light years, please let me know and I’ll add it – until then it’ll only work for people born after 1954.)”

Untitled

having complete deja vu. i wonder, if lost is correct, and we are all time shifting back and forth in search of “constants” that will keep us anchored in one time frame or another.

given that our small human brain has no real conception of the grand scale of time/space and the other three dimensions, it’s possible that we’ve got this whole timeline thing wrong.

i hope so.

“This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s short story Mercurial, which isn’t really about the city at all although it plays a large part. It’s a detective story about an art collector on Mercury. With this city, resistance to the motive force is used to generate large amounts of electricity. The city slides round the entire planet, slowly, again and again. They sell the electricity to other planets.”

Slide 4 of 50 (Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths)

Dell Looks to the Clouds

I live my online life in the cloud, so it’s great to see a major hardware manufacturer start to heavily ponder the shifting trade winds away from desktop based applications towards web based apps…

More Conversations: Dell Launches Cloud Computing Blog – Direct2Dell – The official Dell blog: “Starting today, members from our Data Center Solutions (DCS) team will support a group blog called In the Clouds. It will focus on cloud computing and the backend server, storage and architecture required to make it work. If you’re not familiar with the concept of cloud computing, think using web-based e-mail from Yahoo, Google or AOL (see link for their slick integration with Silverlight), or uploading videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or microblogging with Twitter. When you do those kinds of things you aren’t storing them on your local device.. you’re storing them ‘in the clouds,’ or to a remote location in the Internet.

So, why start with Cloud Computing? The short answer is there’s a lot happening in this space right now. Take a look at what Adobe’s doing with their AIR product (go Twhirl!) that they recently brought to market. Google continues to surge forward with their Google document apps (Spreadsheet Forms and Google Calendar synch are two recent enhancements that rock), and this week at MIX08, Microsoft is rolling out some cool stuff with Silverlight 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8.

What this all means is that we’re at the beginning stages of a shift from the model of the past where applications and all the content created for them were stored locally. This shift has the potential to increase the types of Internet-connected devices we use to consume and create content (check out the good discussion Scoble has going about the battle for web-based content on mobile phones).”

Are you in the cloud or are you sticking with your desktop?