Continuing the rise in the use of Twitter as a tool for companies to communicate with loyal and potential customers, Dunkin Donuts is now spreading 140 character goodness.
Twitter / DunkinDonuts: “Dunkin’ Dave here, Tweeting on behalf of the DD mothership. I’m an American and I’m certifiably running on Dunkin’. “
I have to admit that I’m a much bigger DD fan than Star$ucks, etc (and we don’t have Peet’s here in NC, Lisa).
Off to Dunkin now…
Hard to believe…
Congrats to the CJ team and here’s to the next decade of more innovation.
2008 Elections Gallery from The Google
First Track and now search…
We’ve had to disable person search; it was being abused in ways that were detrimental to the overall stability of the service. We hope to bring out a more stable (and better) version but not in the short term.
Tough luck for all the new members who are just finding out about Twitter and disappointing for those of us doing the heavy lifting of evangelizing the Twitter gospel to the great untracked masses.
Makes you wonder how long we’ll keep doing such…
For those of us with allergic reactions to statistical spreadsheets, a new feature in Google Analytics makes seeing which keywords convert almost fun…
YouTube – Motion Charts in Google Analytics: “Learn to use Motion Charts in Google Analytics to analyze your data in five dimensions. “
Electronic Voting 2.0 – ReadWriteWeb
Affiliate Marketing Legend and all-around geek Todd Crawford and I are back with episode six of our weekly podcast, GeekTo.Me.
We had a ton of fun doing the show and it’s (in my opinion) our best show yet. We definitely keep getting better and better (and geekier and geekier) every week.
So, if you’ve got the stomach for some heavy geek lifting, give it a shot.
The show runs about an hour.
Show Notes:
Freemium vs Premium
Google with OpenID
Google Notebook, Evernote or BackPack?
Netbooks vs iPhones
Mac Adoption with the Kids
iPhone App Restrictions
Android
Windows 7: Will It Save Microsoft?
Linux Desktops and New Ubuntu
Google Maps on iPhone
Hulu
Mint.com and Stupid web2.0 names
eCommerce is Big in Japan
Todd’s Picks: Fring, Panolab, Classic eBook Reader
Sam’s Picks: Everest, VoteReport
AOL is, on the whole, doing things right by its users and the web in general these days.
However, the mail team blew it with this bone-headed post complaining about GMail and written on the level of a jealous 14 year old girl that didn’t make the cheerleading squad but wore the same outfit as the prom queen last Tuesday at the basketball game.
Come on, AOL. You’re better than this. Don’t you have a pretty strict PR dept??
Make sure to read the comment thread for readers’ reactions.
AOL Mail Blog: “An Open Letter to Gmail: Happy Halloween! We love your costume!”
btw, the ability to only embed certain parts of a clip from Hulu is fantastic…
http://www.hulu.com/embed/adjaWvGmgDIOP7dfQqiyQQ/201/238
Hulu – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 – Watch the full episode now.
Since 2000 with the infamous hanging chads and Palm Beach liberals who “voted” for Pat Buchanan, presidential elections have become something of a circus sideshow in themselves. Both Republicans and Democrats fiercely fight over every vote (as they should) and the media loves to chum the waters with tales of voting irregularities.
Thankfully, web2.0 has given us a couple of tools to sort through the impending (and already present thanks to numerous states like my own NC doing the early voting thing… which is terrific, btw) carnival.
Time’s political Swampland blog has more on how voters can “Tweet the Vote” by following special accounts that voting activists groups have set up as well as Time’s own Twitter account:
Swampland – TIME.com » Blog Archive Tweet the Vote! «: “Stepping up to the plate this year to make reporting concerns as easy and as public as possible are two organizations: the grass roots group Twitter Vote Report and the more corporate-y (they have consultants!) Election Protection, who is also partnered with a ton of other organizations, including NBC.
Both groups are encouraging voters to use Twitter as a kind of panopticon of the polling process. I assume you’re following all the right people already, but interested parties should also follow 866ourvote to for real-time poll watching. After the jump, a memo from the group, noting the specific conventions for how to report your own observations and how it works.”
Time also has their own account set up for real time poll watching (which should be awesome). Or you can follow along here.
There’s even an iPhone/iPod Touch app (pictured above… search for “votereport” in the App Store on iTunes).
This is really exciting stuff. I’ve been a political junkie since the Dukakis/Bush ’88 race (I was a dorky 6th grader, ok?) and could only dream of being able to really take part in the political process with tools such as an iPhone or Twitter.
Whatever your persuasion, it doesn’t take much to realize that web2.0 is good at breaking down boundaries and providing both a voice to people and a check on the political corruptions of the past.
A new report from Asustek (say it out loud… it’s fun) says the company will be shipping $200 variations of its now famous (and ubiquitous) eee PC.
I grabbed a 7″ model in January of this year before Asus flooded the market with more variations than imaginable. It’s one of their “weaker” machines in terms of specs now, but I still love the little guy to death and wouldn’t part with him for an ATOM processor-based 8.9″ eee for anything.
So, I was sad to read this:
Asustek expects to ship US$200 Eee PC in 2009, says president: “Shen also pointed out that 7- and 8.9-inch Eee PCs will slowly phase out of the market to be replaced by 10-inch products.”
Part of the charm and mystique of the little computer that started a revolution is its amazingly small size and form factor. I constantly get asked what it is when I’m out in public. When I have the eee and a Kindle at a coffee shop, I look like a real geek freak.
So, go grab a 7 inch Asus eee
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.
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:
Lots of opportunity there!
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!
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.
great great album
(and I’m not just saying that… I’m a huge but critical fan).
Cardinology really grows on you:
http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?v=2&uri=channels/161577&embedId=49353031http://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf
The CARDINAL CAVE – “Fix It” Live on Letterman
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
Wow, email, chat, RSS and now SMS all in one lovely package.
Game changer!
OMG – Webmonkey (thanks to my pal @bmoore622)
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.
I had to do real work, so I missed participating in this week’s GeekCast (even though this might be the greatest podcast cover art ever, thanks to Shawn).
Nonetheless, there are still a few good moments in the show.
Go give it a listen…
The Obama ’08 iPhone app has won great applause from techies and geeks (not just because it’s from Obama) for it’s inventiveness and nifty viral nature for getting out the vote and educating potential or current supporters.
Now it looks as if Sen John McCain’s campaign has gotten into the act (tongue-in-cheek):
Good stuff, my friends.
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?
Having worked on both the network and publisher side of affiliate marketing over the years, I’ve definitely wracked my brain for a solution to the affiliate approval process problem (hereafter known as AAPP… kinda catchy, no?).
Jamie Birch has a new in-depth post on the issue from an affiliate manager’s point of view. Jamie has just launched his new JEB Commerce OPM company and is heavily dealing with the AAPP now.
Jamie’s previous work at Coldwater Creek and Converseon gives him authority on this issue, so if you’re a new affiliate wondering why you got denied for a program, definitely give his post a read (plus subscribe to the blog because it’s loaded with good content already):
Why is my application to affiliate programs always denied? | JEBCommerce – Affiliate Management and Online Advertising: “Along with the known affiliates applying to your program, there are hundreds and thousands of applications that come through that are either suspect, fraudulent or simply incomplete. If you are an affiliate manager reading this, you’ll probably be nodding your head and maybe even have a chuckle. If you are an affiliate that seems to receive more denials than approvals when you apply to programs, this article is just for you. I’d like to highlight some of the things that managers see every day that you may be doing and need to avoid in order to get your applications approved. So let’s get started…”
Perhaps most valuable of all are the list of suggestions at the bottom. Good stuff.