Affiliate Summit 2009 West Countdown Widget

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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.

Google SearchWiki And Custom SERPs: Ruh-Roh Affiliates?

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If you’re a (thin) affiliate marketer, take notice.

To quote the bard Bob Dylan, “things should start to get interesting right about now…”

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results | Webware – CNET: “Google’s SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.

Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some people for months, but starting Thursday it will become available to anybody who’s searching while logged in with a Google account.

‘This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,’ said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. “

Head over to CNet to read the whole piece, but what do we make of this as an affiliate marketing community? Sign of things to come from the repository of the world’s knowledge or just some tinkering to placate the Digg crowd?

I’m thinking it’s a sign of things to come as Google recognizes that the concept of “search,” much like life itself, is subjective and personalized.

If you create good content and are a sticky affiliate, this is good. If you are a thin affiliate that relies mostly on PPC, count ye rosebuds while ye may.

Podcast Place on FriendFeed

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.

Almost Real Time

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I talk a good deal about Twitter’s deafeningly absent (but once very present) Track feature because Track was helping to usher in a new paradigm of finding information in a post-google age until the revolutionary functionality was thrown out with the bath water of scalability earlier this year as Twitter sought to sure itself up.

I still have faith and hope that Track will be restored to Twitter (or a similar service with significant uptake… what Identi.ca could have been but never matured into) in some capacity, even if its in a “Pro” package. There’s just too much potential to let the idea and implementation of Track disappear into scalability limbo.

I’m glad to see there are services trying to fill the gap between minutes and hours of latency with RSS with a more real time experience. One of those services is notify.me:

notify.me – About Us: “notify.me delivers notifications that interest you in near real time. It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are pushed to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application. “

I’ve been using the service for the past week. While the response time is dependent on the actual services being observed, it is a good clearing house for info that you need to get sooner than later.

There’s nothing like the real thing, but it’s good to see the drive towards real time discoverability picking up steam with other services.

AIM Mail Widgets: Webmail Finally Growing Up

I logged into my AIM mail account today. That’s not something I do frequently. However, if these new widgets I found waiting for me are any indication of future development, I may be giving AIM (how about AOL Mail?) a second look.

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AOL is famous for having been a walled-garden portal in the past. However, as I wrote last week, AOL is really on the ball with the whole spirit of the open web by introducing ways to bring in content from such places (competitors?) as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc on the main AOL homepage, which does millions of impressions every month.

And the results from this newfound embracing of openness are more engagement, more pageviews and more attention. AOL is on to something.

With these new widgets in AIM mail, you can integrate Yahoo Mail, contacts, AIM, AOL Finance, Mapquest, etc within your inbox. GMail has this same feature with its Labs platform, so it’s good to see competition there. The trick with AIM is that they are bringing in properties from outside the AOL universe (unless the AIM Mail team knows something about a Yahoo/AOL deal that we don’t). Nifty.

However, my main question is if this is a sign of the future? Will you eventually be able to update Twitter or your Facebook status (or send Facebook messages) within AIM or AOL mail as you can on the AOL home page? If so, that will be very compelling. Will I ditch GMail for AIM even if that happens? Perhaps not, but I will definitely take a second look at my AOL/AIM mail.

It’s time for web-based email clients to grow up and become platforms instead of proprietary gardens of in-house developers. I’m glad to see AOL is helping to make that happen.

Pepperjam is the Network for Comic and SciFi Geeks

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Comics were a huge part of my dorky teen years (but I only read the cool comics that you had to ask for from behind the counter). I still have soft spot in my heart for all things Marvel, DC, Image, Darkhorse, etc.

So, I was excited to see that Pepperjam now has the Marvel affiliate program in their network. Pepperjam also has the Star Trek affiliate program, making it a nostalgic choice for fanboi’s and geeks who, like myself, appreciate the finer things from Jim Lee or Frank Miller. Come to think of it, they also have MGM (Stargate) and Warner Bro’s (DC merchandise, Batman, Harry Potter and 300). Lots of geek cred there.

The Marvel program has 45 day cookies and starts at 7% and works up to 10% with volume. There is supposedly a datafeed on the way as well.

I’ll definitely be checking that one out for Christmas since Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk were such big hits this year and there is always a crowd hungry for X Men and Spiderman goodness (plus there’s the upcoming Wolverine and Avengers movies in the works).

Good stuff.

Marvel Launches Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network