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Please help me fill in the gaps. Full list to be published and distributed next Friday (December 22)…

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Post your ideas in the comments or send me an email.

Google will begin to offer domains for $10 a year in partnership with GoDaddy.

“Hey, wait, Costin,” you say. “That’s great for them, but our organization doesn’t have a custom domain.”

Well, I’m excited to let you know that we’ve made signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain much easier for those of you that don’t yet have your own domain. We’ve partnered with GoDaddy.com and eNom, two leading domain registration services, to offer domains for $10 per year. And I like the fact that we’re including private registration to protect your personal information.

Now you’ve got one-stop shopping for all the services currently on the Google Apps for Your Domain platform — just find a domain, buy it, and get started. We’ll do all the behind-the-scenes configuration work for you. For now this is available for .com, .net,.org, .biz, and .info domains, but we’re working on bringing it elsewhere soon.

The Google Domain Registration service will result from a partnership with GoDaddy and eNom. Google is integrating the service with its Google Apps for Your Domain, which they are hoping to use to entice more people to their Google Pages and Checkout service.

So, the question begs… what is Google hoping to gain by providing free and easy web sites to small companies?

Schmuel Tennenhaus is gathering quite a bit of publicity for his latest YouTube offering on the merger of AT&T and SBC.

“This matter is auspicious, ATT has good wishes, FCC don’t be vicious, wash the dishes,” Schmuel raps between suggestive finger wags. “BellSouth is so hot, merger-licious.”

I’m a huge fan of the Flaming Lips, so using this platform to plug their music doesn’t seem like such a bad idea when they are engaging in such cutting edge fan interaction as this.

You can submit a video to the Flaming Lips YouTube channel to see if you’re good enough to dance with the band during their New Year’s Eve show in LA. Dancing with the band is a time honored tradition, and normally involves some sort of animal suit. It’s strange, but that’s what community is all about.

This New Year’s Eve the Flaming Lips have decided they want to add a special guest to their line up…you.

This is your chance to be a part of the psychedelic cacophony that is the Lips. Your directive: To film yourself in short-form, auditioning to be a member of the Lips on-stage dance troupe; In-costume, showcasing your skills.

Submit your audition video for a chance to win a place on stage dancing with the Flaming Lips during their New Year’s Eve 2007 show in Los Angeles!

Sound good? Well, we think it sounds great.

The band has also put up all of their videos on their YouTube channel. Now that’s just awesome.

If you haven’t seen the Lips live, it’s up there with hearing Brian Littleton playing Rocket Man.

No big surprise here…

DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, today announced the results of a study centered on determining how companies can focus marketing investments to impact the role “word of mouth” plays in purchase decisions. The study, titled “Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth,” is part of a series of reports based on DoubleClick’s Touchpoints IV survey of online consumers.

The DoubleClick Touchpoints IV survey results revealed that influencers consider online advertising a key factor of their shopping process, second only to websites, as a source of further learning about purchase decisions. Nineteen percent of influencers cited web advertising as a source of information when they were researching a purchase, compared to 8 percent among the remainder of the sample. Both segments cited websites as their top source of research when they are shopping, but influencers clearly rely more on the web than non-influencers, with 40 percent of influencers citing websites for this purpose versus 31 percent of non-influencers.

More interesting stats and methodologies to chew on, so check out the press release about the survey here.

Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille released the second episode of Affiliate Thing today.

The show started with the latest buzz about the Federal Trade Commission potentially regulating affiliate marketing, and moved on to sending out gifts to business friends at Christmas, an interview with eBay affiliate manager Lily Shen, the next issue of Revenue magazine, and a charity fundraiser at Affiliate Summit.

The interview with Lily from eBay is particularly interesting. I’ve been watching their API technology since discussing all things mashable with eBay’s Alan Lewis at last summer’s Affiliate Summit East.

eBay is doing some interesting things on the affiliate side and seem to be more amenable to the affiliate industry than Google (considering the Checkout situation at the moment). Lily even stresses the importance of relationships and communities in building eBay’s present and future success, which was nice to hear.

Shawn and Lisa seemed more comfortable with the format and the conversation at the beginning of the show was entertaining. It’s a good listen and seems that the quality will continue to improve each week.

On next week’s Affiliate Thing, a mysterious Mr. X will be giving an interview. My money is on Molander.

Who knows… Shawn might even end up with a coveted monkey phone call from Porter on next week’s show.

Here’s the mp3 of Affiliate Thing 2

Phase 2 of the Cost Per Network, a finalized and full feature functional Cost Per Jobs, is almost ready to roll out for the public. The plan is to unveil the complete interface for the Cost Per Jobs service on Friday. I’ve put a ton of work into the site, trying to make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible while still retaining enough functionality and depth for users.

There will be two main sections – one for job seekers and one for those posting jobs. Job searches can be made by location, keywords, types, requirements, etc. The search functionality is very deep, and that is the place where we’ve put the most work into making the site different from other solutions.

The beta tests have proven successful so far, and we’re still kicking the tires to make sure that everything loads quickly and correctly.

So, if all continues to go well, the new interface will replace the existing one this Friday.

Thanks to everyone who has helped in the testing and those of you who have sent in emails giving quality suggestions about what you’d like to see to make this a valuable service for the online and affiliate industries. Let me know if you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see included!

Phase 3 of the Cost Per Network should be rolling out sometime around Affiliate Summit West, so you’ll be hearing more about that soon 🙂

Network Solutions, best known for their domain registration, SSL certificate technology and web hosting launched a new CPC platform, PerformanceClick.

“We’ve found that most businesses find the process of running successful pay per click advertising campaigns to be very complex and time consuming,” said Champ Mitchell, chairman and CEO of Network Solutions.

“That’s why our team of online marketing experts will do the work for them by researching and selecting the right keywords that help maximize sales on their Web sites.”

The service is similar to other CPC platform where a company pays a monthly amount for a number of clicks every month and consultation on how to maximize the result of their ad expenditure across the channels associated with CPC.

Scanbuy, a six year old mobile marketing company has secured $9 million in Series B funding from Longworth Ventures.

Scanbuy’s technology allows consumers to access mobile commerce and mobile marketing services in a simple and intuitive way. Scanbuy’s barcode-capture technology and services platforms are designed for handset manufacturers, wireless carriers, content providers and retailers to enable swift navigation from the handset to the physical world. Scanbuy is widely acknowledged as the leading solution provider in this emerging market which displays strong growth potential for the consumer wireless market throughout the world.

The funds will escalate growth of Scanbuy’s go-to-market efforts, extend its standard 1D and 2D bar code technology leadership in mobile marketing, and expand its operational capabilities to support growing worldwide adoption of the company’s solutions designed to provide a range of information and services to consumers via their mobile devices.

Along with news of their increased funding, Scanbuy also announced the appointment of Jonathan Bulkeley as Chief Executive Officer.  Bulkeley oversaw barnesandnoble.com through its initial phases into it’s IPO phase.  He also has experience with Sparks Network, IGN and AOL.

Mobile bar scanning technologies continue to amaze me.  When will the affiliate networks start promoting mobile coupons that could be sent from one phone to another?

We’ve all played with Panama by this point, but yesterday the service launched to the general public (without much fanfare or blogging coverage)…

BURBANK, Calif., Dec 12, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that its new search marketing platform, known by its code name, Panama, is now available to advertisers that wish to open a new Yahoo! sponsored search account. Beginning today, U.S. businesses of all sizes can sign up online to begin marketing their products and services through Yahoo!’s easy-to-use, completely redesigned system.

Previously, the system was only open to Yahoo!’s existing search marketing customers that wanted to transition from the old system over to the new platform.

Yahoo is slowly moving over all existing search customers to the new platform. Project Panama does seem to be successful in streamlining Yahoo’s search offerings. However, I’m not sure how much of a dent even an improved Yahoo service will cut into AdSense. One contact referred to this as “Yahoo’s Zune compared to Google’s iPod.”

Have you played with Panama yet? Impressions?