Year: 2008

StumbleUpon Update Coming Soon

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StumbleUpon is one of those sites that everyone uses (or should) but never really talks about. However, as Shawn and I talked about on GeekCast 44, SU has a ton of potential for driving quality “sticky” traffic to sites as well as creating community around them.

If you’re involved in affiliate marketing and not using StumbleUpon, you’re missing out.

And it looks like they are prepping for some major upgrades soon:

StumbleUpon Readies for Another Version Release | Brent Csutoras: “Around 8:00 pm last night, November 19, 2008, StumbleUpon made an announcement in their Beta Group discussions area that they have rolled the majority of their users back to V2 ‘to prepare for upcoming changes that will add new features and optimize many existing ones.’”

I’ll review them when they show up in my account. Head over to Brent’s site and get all the details of what is in store.

Affiliate Summit 2009 West Countdown Widget

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The Affiliate Summit team has put together a neat little Google Gadget for those of use who are always wondering how much longer we have to wait to fly out to Vegas for the show (come on, guys… how about San Fran or Phoenix or Denver one year??).

Regardless of location, Affiliate Summit is a can’t miss show if you’re in the performance marketing world or even the tech space and interested in how the web is being monetized.

Affiliate Summit 2009 West Countdown Google Gadget | Affiliate Summit Blog: “If you’re using iGoogle (Google’s personalized version of the Google homepage), you can add this gadget to it, to remind you just how fast the conference is approaching!”

Nice work, team Affiliate Summit.

Google SearchWiki And Custom SERPs: Ruh-Roh Affiliates?

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If you’re a (thin) affiliate marketer, take notice.

To quote the bard Bob Dylan, “things should start to get interesting right about now…”

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results | Webware – CNET: “Google’s SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.

Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some people for months, but starting Thursday it will become available to anybody who’s searching while logged in with a Google account.

‘This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,’ said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. “

Head over to CNet to read the whole piece, but what do we make of this as an affiliate marketing community? Sign of things to come from the repository of the world’s knowledge or just some tinkering to placate the Digg crowd?

I’m thinking it’s a sign of things to come as Google recognizes that the concept of “search,” much like life itself, is subjective and personalized.

If you create good content and are a sticky affiliate, this is good. If you are a thin affiliate that relies mostly on PPC, count ye rosebuds while ye may.

Podcast Place on FriendFeed

Joe Magennis of Fluid Media has set up a FriendFeed room for podcast sharing and discovery (and has a good podcast of his own with Cameron Watson called Overflow).

I listen to podcasts on a daily basis and it definitely gets difficult to find quality shows that focus on the geek marketing realm where I live (and you probably do as well if you’re reading this).

So, I’m hoping this takes off as a place of sharing and discovery:

Podcast Place – FriendFeed: “A group of people who enjoy the amazing content being produced on the web & want to discover and share it with others.”

Head over and start sharing your favs so I’ll be able to keep the iPod full.

Nice work, Joe.