I Love Disqus

Sam Harrelson on March 18, 2008

The comment solution I use here at CostPerNews is called Disqus. It’s fantastic and the best of both worlds for building a community out of your commenters.

Today, Disqus is announcing a new funding round and a slew of new (and very cool) features that enhances the platform:

Disqus Blog » Disqus releases Beta 2 – New features, lots of bug fixes, improved performance: “Bloggers are some of the most opinionated and vocal people out there. So when creating a product for bloggers, expect them to significantly shape the thing every step of the way.

Disqus is very much such a product. Late last week, we release what we dubbed Beta 2. That’s the label we’re giving to one of the biggest Disqus updates in a long time. And credit goes to you, wonderful Disqus user, for all the help in improving your favorite discussion service.”

So what’s new?

For one the forum look-and-feel is gone and replaced by very nice “Community Pages.” Everything is much more coherently organized and easier to browse. You can see the CPN Comments Page here for an example.

Disqus is also making it easier for commenters to create their own profiles and add social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to that profile fairly easily. Since the crowd here tends to be the same commenters, this could be a neat feature for this particular blog and help you get some traffic to your other social networking spaces. That profile travels with you to other blogs that use Disqus.

There’s lots of additional goodness on the backend for blog owners that I won’t bore you with, but it’s easier to configure the look and feel of the place and easier to bake in the Disqus comments into the originating blog.

For example, the biggest request I had was for a “Recent Comments” widget that would display new comments here on the blog that were reflective of the forum. That’s baked in now, thank goodness.

So, if you’re a blogger and looking for something to spice the place up and bring in extra functionality for your readers and commenters, I highly suggest Disqus.

Performics Employ Submit Resumes?

Sam Harrelson on March 17, 2008

Is this potentially true for Performics as well?

Google Makes DoubleClick Employees Apply To Keep Their Jobs – Silicon Alley Insider: “Last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned DoubleClickers that Google still hadn’t decided how many (and which) of them to fire. Now, Google has reportedly ordered DoubleClickers to submit their resumes to a committee so Google can determine if they’re actually Google material.”

I hope not… lots of good folks over at Perfomics so hopefully there will be no blood-letting. There’s still speculation that Performics will get spun off since Google doesn’t want to double dip in the SEO space, but I don’t see that happening.

Azoogle’s Pitch

Sam Harrelson on March 17, 2008

Azoogle’s Don Mathis gives their elevator pitch at AlwaysOn…

Azoogle | AlwaysOn: “AzoogleAds, founded in 2000, is an end-to-end online marketing solutions provider for advertisers, publishers and online affiliates. Initially a pioneer in performance-based marketing, AzoogleAds generates the highest volumes of quality traffic through its affiliate network, its proprietary search technologies and optimization, and its in-house CPM/CPA/CPC Media Buying.”

Head over there to watch the short video. Interesting to hear Azoogle’s take on performance advertising and how they see it as the future of all online advertising, especially CPA.

eBay Leaves Commission Junction, Starting eBay Partner Network

Sam Harrelson on March 17, 2008

ebay.pngThis morning, eBay is announcing that they are moving their affiliate program in house to the eBay Partner Network effective April 1, 2008 (no fool’s day joke). eBay is also bringing Half.com over to the new network. Affiliates and publishers need to have links changed over by May 1, 2008.

Of course, this means that eBay is leaving Commission Junction as its affiliate network platform. This is a blow against CJ in terms of a solid long lasting program with significant revenues and strong brand name in a month where CJ is already wrapped up in a PR food fight with Pepperjam Network.

With over 60,000 affiliates here in the United States and 100,000 affiliates worldwide, eBay is a significant powerhouse in the affiliate marketing world. So why the move?

I spoke to the Senior Manager of the eBay affiliate program, Will Martin-Gill, and he emphasized that the move had nothing to do with a dissatisfaction with CJ or ValueClick.

Instead, Martin-Gill said it was time to bring the affiliate program in-house the same way eBay brought their search services in-houe a couple of yeas ago. Martin-Gill told me eBay is also looking to build in more flexibility and innovation into their program to reach and sustain the more diverse crowd of affiliates and publishers on the web today and to have a direct relationship with those affiliates (key point, I believe). In short, eBay wants more control over data and wants to be able to coordinate across marketing channels.

Martin-Gill said the international factor was also a major reason for the move away from CJ to in-house managing of the affiliate program. eBay is looking to turn its program into a global platform where publishers and affiliates can sign up to all the various country-specific programs at once through the same interface.

Shopping API’s and eventually RSS will be implemented into the program as well as in-depth reporting.

I also spoke with ValueClick VP John Ardis and CJ’s Dave Osmond on Friday about eBay’s departure. They emphasized the mutual good will on both sides and said the move was not a surprise, but something that CJ had been working with eBay on for the last couple of years realizing the needs that eBay had for their affiliate program.

Ardis also pointed out that eBay is not severing all ties with ValueClick or Commission Junction since VC’s Mediaplex tracking solution is being used for the eBay Publisher Network and Tradera AB, ProStores, Reseller Marketplace, Media Marketplace, eBay Stores and StubHub will continue to be on the CJ platform.

This is certainly a major development and could signal a sea change for the place of the networks in the affiliate marketing world. We’ll have to see how affiliates and merchants respond to the news.

I Can’t Wait for Flickr Video

Sam Harrelson on March 16, 2008

flickr.jpg

The long standing rumors that Flickr would open a video channel for users to share their uploaded video content similar to their wonderful photo sharing service looks like it will finally be validated according to TechCrunch.

So the question becomes… why? With YouTube, Viddler, Blip.tv, Revver (?), Vimeo, Metacafe, etc why would Flickr want to get into such a crowded space.

Matthew Ingram raises similar questions:

One question on Flickr Video: Why? – – mathewingram.com/work: “So Mike Arrington says in a post over at TechCrunch that Flickr is going to be adding video soon — really. This rumour has been around for awhile, as Mike himself acknowledges, and in fact Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield has been talking about adding video for at least a year. One obvious question is why it has taken so long (likely answer: Yahoo red tape), but a related question is: Why bother?”

Here’s my take: I can’t wait for video on Flickr. The community of friends and colleagues that I’ve created around my photos there is a very valuable and high quality one with which would love to share video.

nelson.jpgI can’t say the same for any other video uploading platform, especially YouTube. Have you ever posted a video on YouTube and taken the time to read the comments that follow? In other words, the “community” on YouTube is terrible and reminds me of a middle school lunch room full of Nelsons.

So, just for my own selfish sharing reasons, I am excited about Flickr Video.

Dell Looks to the Clouds

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

I live my online life in the cloud, so it’s great to see a major hardware manufacturer start to heavily ponder the shifting trade winds away from desktop based applications towards web based apps…

More Conversations: Dell Launches Cloud Computing Blog – Direct2Dell – The official Dell blog: “Starting today, members from our Data Center Solutions (DCS) team will support a group blog called In the Clouds. It will focus on cloud computing and the backend server, storage and architecture required to make it work. If you’re not familiar with the concept of cloud computing, think using web-based e-mail from Yahoo, Google or AOL (see link for their slick integration with Silverlight), or uploading videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or microblogging with Twitter. When you do those kinds of things you aren’t storing them on your local device.. you’re storing them ‘in the clouds,’ or to a remote location in the Internet.

So, why start with Cloud Computing? The short answer is there’s a lot happening in this space right now. Take a look at what Adobe’s doing with their AIR product (go Twhirl!) that they recently brought to market. Google continues to surge forward with their Google document apps (Spreadsheet Forms and Google Calendar synch are two recent enhancements that rock), and this week at MIX08, Microsoft is rolling out some cool stuff with Silverlight 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8.

What this all means is that we’re at the beginning stages of a shift from the model of the past where applications and all the content created for them were stored locally. This shift has the potential to increase the types of Internet-connected devices we use to consume and create content (check out the good discussion Scoble has going about the battle for web-based content on mobile phones).”

Are you in the cloud or are you sticking with your desktop?

Game Changing Tech

Sam Harrelson on February 19, 2008

Yesterday, BlogTalkRadio released an API structure for making basic podcasts.

Basically, you call into 646-200-0000 and record audio on your phone. Sounds simple, but the backend is where it gets fun.

Once you make your call and record your message, audio or (potentially) podcast, you can access it via RSS at a feed determined by the number from which you called.

For example, here is the feed for my “roadcasts” as I’m calling them. If you click that link, you’ll be taken to an RSS feed that will allow you to hear podcasts as I make them on the fly. I’m posting them on my “art blog”http://qual.ms, but if you use a feed reader you can just grab the feed.

This could be huge, folks. Simple. Easy. No “web2.0” interface, just RSS goodness.

And if you need A List validation, here is Scoble’s feed and here is more from the Father of RSS and one of my scripting heroes, Dave Winer.