The Politician’s very own affiliate network

Stumbled upon a very interesting blog post earlier today via a post on ABW about how politicians can benefit from affiliate marketing.

and I quote:

A campaign manager is paid, so why couldn’t a supporter of Obama get a small fee for every legitimate email address she or he refers to signup to the Obama mailing list? Or a 10% cut of any donation money she refers? It might blur the line between knowing if your friend really believes in Obama’s ideas, or is just doing it for money, but in some ways it’s just about getting people to learn more about the candidate and make their own decisions.

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New Social Shopping site - FashMatch

Here’s another brand new “Beta”( ) Social Shopping site that I recently discovered.

FashMatch.com lets users create, share and discuss Matches. The site is offering a new web 2.0 way to offer and receive (and critique) fashion advice.

So basically, you select from their database of apparel and accessories and create an entire outfit out of that, put it up for sharing within the social network and debate. simple. Of course, they also send advice seekers (and advice givers) to stores where they can buy each part of these user-mashed (or rather, matched - I’ve begun to use too much web 2.0 lingo these days) outfits.
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Nominate the best of 2006 on ABW

It’s that time of the year when ABWers from around the globe nominate the best Affiliate marketing products, services, people and companies of the year gone by.

The Nominations for 2006 have begun on AbestWeb.com

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SearchAdvisor - paid search marketing for e-retailers on autopilot.

Clickz reported earlier today that ChannelAdvisor recently launched a new service called SearchAdvisor, that allows online advertisers to manage paid search campaigns on Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and Ask.com with a single interface.

Built with e-retailers in mind, searchadvisor has some very interesting features, some of which are:

Search Marketing Analytics
lets you keep a check on ROI of individual keywords by monitoring campaign performance by order, products sold or revenue generated.

Bulk Campaign Upload
Lets you submit your campaign to all supported search engines in one go.

Automated Bid Management
This one is cool - you can set rules to automatically manage your bids. For example, lowest ROI keywords can automatically go into the “spend very little on this” zone.

Landing Page Optimization
Track conversions and compare landing pages based on combined revenue, expense, conversion rates and ROI.

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Facebook exploring the “Gifts” niche

Top Social networking site for college students, Facebook, is going to start selling gifts!

According to a blog post earlier today at TechCrunch.com, these will be virtual gifts, or small icons that can be sent to other Facebook members for $1 each and can be displayed on a “wall” in their facebook pages.

During February, Facebook will be donating everything they make by selling these giftable icons to charity.

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Yahoo! Mindset

FinalTag.com was visited by a new spider a few moments ago.

The crawling robot calls itself “Yahoo! mindset”. Never heard of that before so I googled it and saw this

This is awesome stuff, Yahoo is calling it Intent-driven Search. Mindset let’s users view different SERPS by selecting if they want more commercial or informational content.

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Google to make money from Google apps for your domain

…and it’s not just via advertising. They’re planning to charge real cash for it. Google Apps for Your Domain is the set of apps that includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Page Creator, a start page, and eventually the word processing and spreadsheet apps from Google Docs - all branded and accessible via yourdomain.com. (I’m currently using this for free on the website for my creative and programming solutions company, ideasoutright.com - mainly for Gmail and Google talk)

The service is currently being offered free to businesses during Google Apps’ beta period, but will apparently go live with subscriptions “in the coming weeks,” according to BusinessWeek. How much Google will charge organizations for the service is still uncertain, but the fee will reportedly amount to “a few dollars per person per month.”

There is good news for me (and all those who got to use Google Apps during beta) though, the google apps website states “Organizations accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.”

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Amazon on your TV

Apart from iTunes, no other major online video download service, including walmart’s new video store that launched yesterday let’s you watch downloaded content on your TV or portable media device - thanks to what has now become a curse word, DRM. All you can do is download it on your computer, and watch it there on a windows media player. Of course, none of these video download services are available for the mac.

Amazon has just stepped in to change that - well, almost. In a deal announced today, Amazon and TiVo will let TiVo owners who shop on Amazon Unbox - the part of amazon where they sell digital content, to send movies and TV shows to their broadband-connected TiVo boxes, and pause and fast-forward through them as they do a regular TV program. This is going to put them in direct competition with Apple’s new apple TV device and iTMS video downloads.

“As we know, a lot of people spend their time shopping and browsing for content they love on their PC, and the cable services don’t allow you to do that,” Said Bill Carr vice president for digital media at Amazon.

Yet, unlike iTunes, many of the common DRM rules that plague the windows-based video download market apply. Videos rented from the site must be watched within 30 days, and once a video starts playing it must be watched within 24 hours.

[source]

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A brief history of the web

Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University uploaded this video on youtube 5 days ago. I stumbled upon it while blog-hopping and first saw it on this post from the blog Somewhat frank.

Beware: This video is such an accurate representation of the “history of the web” that it may make your mind stop thinking for a few moments after you watch it.

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YPN program policies update - only 3 ads per page please

The Yahoo! publisher network announced a revised set of program policies on their blog earlier today.

The most major change being that they will be emulating the Adsense policy of not allowing any more than three ad-units per page. This is in order to “encourage best practices” according to Yahoo. A good move, in theory. Something that never really did any help to Google Adsense in stopping spam.

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