Wilco Performing The Wilco Song on Colbert Report

Wilco performed an exclusive song on The Colbert Report last night. Before the performance, Jeff Tweedy sat down with Colbert for a pretty funny interview. Here are a few highlights:

Colbert introducing the band at the beginning of the show says: “True Wilco fans will listen to the show on vinyl.” Awesome.

Colbert: I like your American flag lapel pin.
Tweedy: Where’s yours?
Colbert: I gave mine to Barack Obama.

Tweedy then gives Colbert an Obama tshirt.

Colbert: You offer a song for free on your website. Are you a socialist?
Tweedy: We’re just lousy capitalists. We thought free market meant free.

The song is interestingly good… Tweedy said it’s called “Wilco: The Song.” Main refrain is that “Wilco will love you baby.” Odd, but a good rocker from the gang. And it was neat to see them crammed onto the small Colbert stage. Looks like they were enjoying it. Of course Nels had his whole guitar-to-the-amp distortion thing going on.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/G8nYYhUzrpavlkFMFD_U_w/693/1235

Hulu – The Colbert Report: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 – Watch the full episode now.

Affiliate Opportunity: Google Now Indexes PDF’s

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One of the keys to success in affiliate marketing is getting your site or link in front of the people who are looking for the info, services, etc you are representing.

Google has helped create the affiliate marketing landscape by becoming the world’s database of information as well as being fairly transparent on what it takes to rank well in the search result pages organically (not to mention the ability to pay for positions on relevant keywords).

So, this new move by Google to ramp it up on the recognition and indexing of PDF’s is promising for smart affiliates given that history. Why? Because PDF’s are a great way to produce quality content on specific topics. Instead of having to invest the time, effort or money into OCR efforts themselves, affiliates can let Google do the heavy hauling and have the info indexed. Nifty.

Google Search Indexes Scanned Documents – AppScout: “Google today, however, announced a new technology that lets the search engine perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned documents saved in Adobe PDF format. OCR converts the picture of words into actual words. “

And here’s the Official Google Blog post about the new feature.

Here are some examples of what’s in store:

repairing aluminum wiring

spin lock performance

Lots of opportunity there!

Google’s New Link Reading: Potential Problem for Affiliates?

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For those of you not content with Google’s present level of omnipotence, here’s more for you to chew on:

Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages: “Today Google introduced some changes in the way they index content from blogs / RSS feeds.

Earlier they were only using links from RSS feeds to determine the resultset for link: operator but now they consider links that are mentioned on web pages as well very similar to Technorati.

This means that if another blog (abc.com) has linked to your own blog (my.com) from his sidebar, Google will now show abc.com in the results as well when you query for link:my.com.

If there were a Technorati Rank like parameter for Google Blogs Search, almost every blog may have seen major fluctuations in their rank due to this simple change.”

If you do your affiliate marketing via blogs (or even RSS), take note because this will definitely have an hand in determining your site’s PageRank as well as its organic rank.

The bigger question is how this might (in the long term) affect affiliate marketers. Affiliates necessarily rely on links as the lingua franca of doing business because the nature of the economic model. Will Google slap affiliate sites with too many commercial (affiliate) links in the search results?

Fun stuff to ponder on Halloween!

I Miss Larry

It’s always late at night (it’s almost 3am now) that I miss Larry the most. It’s been less than a week, but reading a great blog post somewhere about an obscure Southern writer or statesman or chef and her or his connection to the Civil War or some county in Tennessee or Kentucky or Alabama or South Carolina makes me wish Larry was there to receive the email link I really want to send him.

Muscle memory is a hard thing to forget.

Love you, Larry.

Highrise Deals

http://www.viddler.com/player/fde939d1/

I really do love Basecamp, BackPack and Highrise. All three of these products make up a substantial part of my business life as an affiliate and I can’t imagine having to hack together a “getting-things-done” solution without them.

Even my wife, a physician, loves and uses BackPack on a daily basis.

So, I’m excited to see this new addition to Highrise (a fantastic CRM manager):

37signals Product Blog: Big new Highrise feature: Deals: “Deals let you keep track of proposals, bids, RFPs, and project sales right inside Highrise. Highrise has always been great for keeping track of the people you do business with, but now with Deals you can keep track of the business transactions as well.

Now you’ll know which proposals/bids are pending, which you’ve won, and which you’ve lost. Enter notes about the deals, attach proposals or contracts to the deals, and keep a log of any changes. Now you’ll know how much money a particular customer has paid you over time or how much you’ve left on the table from deals you didn’t win.”

Seriously, if you aren’t using BackPack or Basecamp (at least), you’re missing out.

Affiliate Networks and OpenID?

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Google has just announced its support for OpenID across its services. Yahoo and Microsoft have also adopted the “one-sign-in” OpenID platform as well.

That’s great news and great for users and people moving to the cloud with applications like GMail or Google Docs or Google Calendar. Best of all, you can use that same ID to login into a number of web apps that aren’t owned by one company such as Google.

This is incredibly important for the growth of cloud computing as more productivity moves to the web.

However, when will publishers be able to use a platform like OpenID to login to CJ or Linkshare or Motive’s Advent or LinkConnector or Azoogle or ShareASale or even the Google Affiliate Network?

I have a myriad of ill-thought out affiliate network logins that I simply can’t remember. Being able to login to a network with something like an OpenID would make that network a favorite of mine by default!

I can haz?