Category: Marketing

Disqus API Plugin Update

For people like Scott Jangro that are fans of the Disqus API plugin (instead of the Javascript one that has all the fancy features), there’s an update according to Disqus’ Daniel Ha (Disqus being the commenting platform used here and on numerous other sites):

twitter: danielha: If you use the API version of the Disqus WP plugin, we’ve released an interim version with a few updates. Get it here http://snurl.com/2tkt5

I’d love to see the API plugin become as full featured as the Javascript plugin and would probably make the switch if/when that happens. Until then, I’m sticking with the features.

Amazon’s New Video Widget

Amazon has a nifty new video solution that allows you to embed product links based on what you’re talking about in videos you are hopefully making. At the end of the video, the featured products are then shown in a list with prices and ratings.

It’s pretty straightforward and the video demo does a good job of explaining the new feature.

Be warned that if you watch from 2:04 onwards, your eyes will bleed.

http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822/US/amazonvbg-20/8011/00dd30cc-6cec-4b9a-92c1-55e7a3b206da&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate

Told ya.

Amazon Video Widget

Kowabunga! Slims Down Portfolio

Kowabunga!, rebranded a few months ago from Think Partnership, is divesting itself of Cherish (dating), MarketSmart (offline) and iLeadMedia (lead gen):

Kowabunga! to Divest Several Non-Core Business Units: “The Company intends to focus its efforts on its Network and other interactive businesses which have potential for enhanced growth. The business units that are no longer considered critical to its long term strategy and identified for divestiture are: (1) Cherish Inc., which provides online personals services; (2) MarketSmart Advertising Inc., which provides traditional offline advertising services; and (3) iLead Media, LLC, which provides online lead generation and digital marketing services. Proceeds from the sales will be used to reduce indebtedness and to fund the expected continued growth of the Network segment. “

The company’s stock price has been on the slide since a high of around $6 in 2004 and around $3.50 in 2007.

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Kowabunga! has a soft spot in many people’s hearts in the industry (I was a consultant there for a few months) as we remember the “good old days” so hopefully the ship will turn around with this divestment.

Google Assumes Omnipotence, Can Now Index Flash

What does this mean for video?

Once Nearly Invisible To Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found And Indexed: “Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them. “

For sites such as Seesmic which rely heavily on a Flash interface, this is great news SEO wise. While I’m not a fan of the mostly Flash pages (like those that seemed to be the front-end of every DirectTrack CPA network in 2005), a little Flash can engage the viewer/user and turn their stay into a longer one.

Regardless, as Jim Kukral says… start doing video and tagging it properly if you want to have a future online.

Google Affiliate Network

I saw a few tweets coming in and then Jangro posted the press release… I’m still trying to grok this (that word is acceptable here) but will share some thoughts soon.

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We are pleased to introduce Google Affiliate Network . Effective Monday, June 30, 2008, DoubleClick Performics Affiliate will operate as Google Affiliate Network. The integration with Google’s brand is a reflection of efforts to quickly assimilate our business and teams, as well as reinforce Google’s commitment to the Affiliate channel. Together with our new colleagues at Google we are creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion and innovation in Affiliate Marketing.

Within the next couple of weeks you will see some exciting changes to the user interface reflecting the new brand. The platform will continue to be hosted at www.ConnectCommerce.com, but will eventually migrate to a google.com product url.

As noted in earlier communications, DoubleClick Performics’ Search operations are being spun off and sold to a third party. While many advertisers have relationships with both DoubleClick Performics’ Affiliate and Search, there have always been separate account teams and product-specific specialists servicing clients’ search and affiliate programs. These teams remain intact. While the formal separation will occur when the Search business is sold, the businesses are functionally separate today.

We are proud of what we achieved as Performics and this name change signals a new milestone. Google provides world-class resources and enables us to continue to attract the best talent to support our advertisers and publishers. Now as part of Google we have an exciting and unprecedented opportunity to advance our industry. We remain committed to ensuring you receive the quality service you have come to expect from us.

We appreciate your business and look forward to doing great things together.

Sincerely,

Chris Henger

Group Product Manager
Google Affiliate Network

Validation? Market consolidation? Same old same old? Industry clean up due to the invisible hand of the free market?

Open Sourcing PPC Policy Creation

I noticed from one of brianlittleton‘s tweets that ShareASale is putting together an “open source” PPC policy creation template…

Open Source the PPC Policy Creation – ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum: “One of the things that we will be doing is providing a list of things that a Merchant should and must consider when generating a ‘good’ PPC policy. For example, some Merchants consider things like their ‘domain name’, or ‘TM’, but don’t consider that same word in conjunction with another term such as ‘special’ or ‘vs. a competitor’ …

So – I am here offering and asking for a collaborative effort to generate a template/wishlist/helpsheet for Merchants who want to generate a policy.”

Lots of great stuff going on in that thread at ABW and it’s awesome to see a network reaching out to both affiliates and merchants in such a manner. Go over and participate if you have thoughts on the issue (and who doesn’t?!).

As always, nice work, Brian.

Sorry, Jangro

Yes, she did say it. Evidently it went over pretty flat. More people need to listen to GeekCast, dammit!

Congrats again to Lisa AND Jangro. My wife thinks Scott is my most normal “internet friend” if that means anything (which it does). We give you lots of heck on the show, Jangro… but we do love you and you’ll always be the fifth Beatle in my book.

Seth Godin on the Kindle (And Why I Still Love Mine)

I love my Kindle.

Just this morning, I was in bed watching my favorite program on TV (and about the only thing I watch on TV these days), MSNBC’s Morning Joe. There was a fascinating exchange between show pundit Pat Buchanan and economist Jeffrey Sachs on the topic of energy independence and offshore drilling. Sachs fired back against Buchanan’s typical conservatism (and nativism) with clear and coherent points about the future of energy production and our planet.

At the end of the segment, Joe Scarborough mentioned Sachs’ new book, Commonwealth. I knew then that I had to have it. So, I reached over to the bedside, grabbed my Kindle and about a minute later I was reading the book on the same device that I had read half of another book just a few hours ago.

For me, that’s a game changer.

I love my Kindle.

So, I was happy to see that Seth Godin had written about his experiences with the Kindle since getting one a couple of months ago. Thanks to Jim Kukral for sending that link over.

Seth’s Blog: Random thoughts about the Kindle: “Two months ago, I got a Kindle. It’s a fascinating device, unlike almost any other launched by a significant tech company. Here’s why:”

The only part I disagree on is the “Kindle is a woman’s device” part because most of the top selling Kindle books are on an Oprah list and non-techy. The same can be said for the NY Times Top 10 list (or any top 10 book selling list). Heck, I’m a geek and I don’t read tech or business books. There are plenty of history and political books in the Kindle’s top sellers list which traditionally skew male as well.

Head over and read his thoughts. You just might want a Kindle yourself.

Disqus Trackbacks

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Yay!

Our long international blogging conundrum is over.

Disqus FTW!

Disqus Blog » New: Enable Support for Trackbacks in Disqus: “Go to the Configure tab and scroll down to General Settings. Check the box and let it do its thing. This is our support for standard Trackbacks. More fun Linkback implementations still to come.”

However, this only works for the JS plugin, not the API plugin. Sorry, Jangro (seriously, head over to Jangro’s blog to see why that matters to some).

Spore is Brilliant

We talked about Spore on GeekCast today because the Spore Creature Creator was released.

How will you create the universe?

With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Or if you prefer, spend as much time as you like making creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships with Spore’s unique Creator tools.

CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic – From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.

EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages – It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.

EXPLORE your world and beyond – Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?

SHARE with the World – Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.

So, I spent some time creating a creature tonight (just a few mins, I promise). First impressions is that this is going to be a wildly successful hit. Why? Incredible game design/feel and incredibly smart marketing. We’re talking original Doom style viral stuff that is going to make this game a runaway.

You can grab pictures, avatars and videos of your creature as you go through the game. There’s even an “upload to YouTube” function right in the game. Brilliant. You can see a short vid I did of my creature above as an example. And there’s even a dedicated site called SporeVote integrated into the game for fan votes on their favorite created creatures.

On your harddrive, everything is kept nicely in a folder that is created within the Documents section (on a Mac… not sure how that works on PCs):

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All in all, I’m highly impressed. Of course, this is going to be a big “time waster” but isn’t that what all games are for? I can’t tell you how much time I “wasted” on Sim City (who shares its creator with Spore), but I look back on fondness at those times.

Can’t wait until the full game is released in September.

NASCAR TV on Ustream

I’m not sure how happy the Speed Channel and networks that broadcast NASCAR races would be about this. But until they start streaming the races in a similar format to MLB.tv, this is a nifty Ustream workaround for those of us stuck in offices during qualifying or races:

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/133638Online Video provided by Ustream

Pay attention networks… people want to do things like watch NASCAR races or football games or soccer games. Hulu is excellent for dramas and sitcoms, but there’s huge opportunity here for content producers in the sports and live events content creation business!

Google Gears and Delicious Now Support Firefox 3

Thanks to Content Robot‘s @danarockel for the tip that Google Gears now works with Firefox 3.

If you’re a big user of Google Docs, Google Reader, Zoho or RememberTheMilk, the Gears integration allows you to work in these apps while offline. Hopefully, we’ll see GMail and Google Calendar integrated with Gears very soon. When that happens, I’m basically 100% in the cloud since I still rely on a few desktop apps for getting work done while on a plane.

If you’re using Firefox 3 (and you should be since it’s much speedier and less of a resource hog), head over to the Google Gears page to grab the update.

If you use Delicious for bookmarks, they’ve also updated their browser plugin to work with Firefox 3. I just installed the new plugin and it’s got a pretty nifty new network feature so that you can see activity from your Delicious contacts and network.

So, if you’re using Delicious, feel free to add me to your network so that we can share bookmarks.

Embargoes and The Rest of Us

Although I did win “Best Blogger” at the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle awards this year, I am by no means an A Lister. I live in North Carolina, I don’t blog 20 hours a day and I’ve never been on the Gillmor Gang (although Gillmor did comment on one of my posts a while back, which was neat).

So, I was a little surprised last month when I unknowingly broke an embargo regarding Disqus’ integration of Seesmic…

Disqus Now Has Seesmic Integration at CostPerNews: “Now, you can enable video comments through Seesmic integration with Disqus.”

I’m reminded of this because I was goofing around on Summize this morning and came across this back-and-forth between Robert Scoble and CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern:

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Truth be told, I stumbled upon the new feature that morning while approving a comment and just before heading out on a flight. I thought it was curious, so I did what any blue-blooded American with a blog would do… I blogged it. I was almost late for my flight, but I thought it was a neat new feature that I wanted to share with my small yet devoted audience here.

When I landed later that day, I had a number of emails flood into the BlackBerry asking why I “went early” with the story and broke the embargo. I felt bad at first, but then I realized that I had blogged about a feature that was already there… how was that breaking anything?

If I had been aware of such an embargo, I would have definitely not posted the story until the approved time (I’ve honored dozens of them here) and really don’t see the need or gain from being able to yell “FIRST!” on TechMeme at this point (this blog has been around for a while, is comfortable in its little niche and is not meant to be on TechMeme anyway).

Moral of the story… if you’re a tech provider / merchant and you’re going to put a-listers under an embargo, don’t release the feature early so that z-listers like myself can see and blog about it.

Belated apologies to Robert, Allen, TechCrunch, etc for jumping the gun of a race I didn’t know I was running.