Category: Marketing

Sad. I really enjoyed the Relevantly Speaking blog. It is not common that an affiliate network is willing to blog about things besides “company news and offer promotion.”

Mediatrust Blog: “First, Relevantly Speaking as you know it today will change drastically. First, the blog portion will cease to exist. As proud as I am of the work we’ve done on it, we just don’t have the resources to continue writing two blogs for our company. That said, all of our blogging will be done here at blog.MediaTrust.com. The focus of that effort will be performance marketing, company news, and offer promotion. The goal is to really concentrate on our brand and make sure our blogging efforts really support our core business of performance based marketing.”

I really don’t see how it costs anymore to keep up a high quality blog rather than one focused on telling a (what will probably be dwindling) reader base about the HOTTEST NEW OFFERS! in a network.

And the interviews from places like the last Affiliate Summit were top-notch.

Oh well. Economy sucks.

Last year Jason Calacanis gave the keynote at Affiliate Summit and made the point (if I may summarize) that affiliate marketers are bright and have lots of potential but think too small…instead they need to make quality platforms that people and VC’s will get behind.

Clearly, that mindset should have changed as the economy continues to dive bomb and the Silicon Valley companies (such as Calacanis’ VC backed Mahalo) that Jason lauded continue to make double digit percentage staff cuts in the name of runway to survive the long recession/depression that we’re in for.

However, I’m listening to the new This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte, which features Jason Calacanis, John C. Dvorak (drink!) and Sarah Lane. Listen to the first 15 or so minutes if you’re interested in how much Jason’s views haven’t changed over the last year regarding affiliate sites being equatable to parked pages and spam.

Look, I hate spam as much, if not more, than the next guy. Just follow me on Twitter if you’d like to see an affiliate marketer filled with self-angst over the spam problem. I recognize that some “affiliates” use tactics that suck and should be looked down upon. But that is not the majority of affiliates considering that “affiliate marketing” itself is mushrooming to encompass a whole range of publishers because of the evolution of the social web.

However, an outsider calling all affiliate sites spam for his own business gain is just lame considering Mahalo itself is an affiliate site. I guess the Valley way to eliminate competition is to call it spam.

Good luck with those runways, Jason. We’ll keep the traffic flowing in the control tower.

My pal Angel Djambazov of ReveNews has a great post on his frustrations with the MyBlogLog platform and its incessant spam problem.

I offer up a few thoughts about why and how this could be resolved in the comments there (basically, the model of MBL is flawed and that’s why Twitter is the winner).

Some from Angel:

MyBlogLog Needs to Wake Up Their Porn Problem | ReveNews: “MyBlogLog has all the elements of a really great tool. Blog owners, especially those whose content is more news orientated, will find the oversight that allows these spammers in as a poor reflection on their community.

Yahoo needs to realize that in certain cases a picture can equal a thousand words of spam. Until then actual readers can get their news and their g-string pictures at the same time.”

And some from me:

“That’s why I think Twitter and the platforms that have been made popular since MBL was sold to Yahoo back in ‘07 have done so well (especially for those of us in the marketing space)… it’s the publisher or user who gets to be the gatekeeper and fend off the spammers as they arise. The follow/no-follow/block paradigm is much better than the wild-west mentality of MBL.”

Good convo going on there… head over to ReveNews and add some of your thoughts.

I’m a power RSS user.

I normally have somewhere around 200-500 feeds that I actively read on a daily basis (yeah, I know).

So, I’m glad to see an update from Google Reader. It’s been the app that has kept me from selling my soul to Google since NetNewsWire kicks its webby butt.

That might change.

Official Google Reader Blog: Square is the new round.

Can’t argue much with this assessment from Razorfish:

Razorfish issues last rites for Web 2.0 – iMediaConnection.com: “‘Web 3.0 will be much more focused on business solutions and less on marketing communications,’ he says. ‘We’re at a point now where you take all of these tools — websites, search, mobile, targeted ads — and put them together in an integrated fashion.'”

Although, I’d throw in web3.0 will be all about Track. No, seriously.

Head over to iMedia to get the full discussion.

sweet…

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.

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.

I don’t have the new “Themes” feature in my GMail yet (and probably won’t use them when I do), but my GMail interface just changed over to a new theme without me doing anything (pic above).

Is this one of the new themes or is there a new default GMail theme all together?

Anyone else seeing this?

GMail Theme Change on Flickr – Photo Sharing!