Affiliate summit pinnacle awards - Congratulations to Haiko - Affiliate Marketing Advocate, Connie - Affiliate of the year , Sam - Best Blogger, Brian - Affiliate Marketing Legend, Melissa Salas - Affiliate Manager of the Year and CSN Stores - Exceptional Merchant.

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Wayne porter on affiliate marketing - Mahalo’s Missing DNA back at you Jason Calacanis

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“Are you an affiliate marketer? You suck!” ~ Calacanis

Jason calacanis keynoted at the Affiliate Summit’08 today. I was very curious what the SEO hater would talk about at the summit ever since it was announced that he will be keynoting the event. Sam Harrelson live-blogged the speech at revenews, which I just finished reading (I’m not at the summit, just sitting here in Bombay wondering what happened - thanks, Sam for the liveblogging!).

Not surprisingly, Jason’s general sentiment during the speech seems to be filled with hate towards the industry with statements like “Give up a life of crime”, “You are at the bottom of the food chain” and “Affiliate marketing is bullshit”, there couldn’t have been a worse affiliate summit keynote speech.

“Someone in this room could create the next digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, etc. None of you probably will create these companies because you’re wired for the quick buck.” ~ Jason Calacanis

Clearly, Jason, who thinks all affiliates are spammers and haven’t added value whatsoever to the web doesn’t really understand what affiliate marketing is. Let me define it for you here jason. Affiliate marketing is the simple act of connecting a buyer with a seller, and it has added tremendous value to the web, and created bigger brands that you will ever dream of creating. Which brands? okay .. lets see .. Affiliate number 1. Ebay - connects buyers with sellers, takes a cut. 2. Google, Same thing, only more CPC. Shopping.com and shopzilla, etc - same thing. Smaller affiliates are also doing the exact thing in smaller, unique and niche specific ways. Jason, I had really hoped you’d have done your homework this time, everyone is tired of your same old hate-speeches.

It is true, some people in the affiliate industry need to do cleaner businesses, but Calacanis - by classifying every affiliate at the bottom of the food chain and etc, has been a total waste of an affiliate summit keynote.

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The all new Linkshare Publisher Dashboard Launches Today

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Venturebeat article about the growth of visual shopping search service Like.com

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Nokia’s all new mobile advertising platform http://tinyurl.com/33ovty

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Amazon Product Ads - Amazon becomming a comparison shopping engine!?!

Big news happened yesterday, and I almost missed it. I came across an article that I sort of bookmarked in my del.icio.us to read later, and forgot all about until I came across the same news in techcrunch again today when I had one of those “WTF?” moments.

Anyway, Amazon, it seems, has launched Product Ads - it will transform the retailer into a comparison shopping engine. Why there is no press release or an email about this, is something I have no Idea about, but apparently amazon is going to put product listings - from other retailers - on amazon.com and for a per click fee, direct traffic straight to these retailers’ websites, instead of buyers having to buy using amazon. This will eventually make amazon something very similar to shopping.com, price grabber, nextag, shopwiki, etc.

More on the story at: Tech Crunch, Comparison Engines, Redeye VC

“With Product Ads, as a seller you can participate in this cost-per-click program that allows customers to see YOUR products and price offerings. Customers viewing your products can click over to your website where they can buy directly from you.”

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Amazon adds more features to widgets

Since launching affiliate widgets in september last year, Amazon announced today that affliates have created over 200,000 of these nifty web 2.0 marketing small-wonders already.

“Many of you came back with great suggestions and we’ve picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release.”

Amazon also announced today the addition of various new features that are being added to associate widgets starting today. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, associates can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. one can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

Power to affiliate widgetry!

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Amazon SQS prices slashed http://tinyurl.com/ytdjdx

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A Web 2.0 way to track shipments for online shoppers

You love shopping online, in fact, you buy online all the time. That’s cool, but because online shopping also means having to keep a track of the shipments of your orders, it can be quite a headache at times.

G2web20.net, a web 2.0 apps directory, had a link to Trackmyshipments.com in their RSS feed today. TrackMyShipments is a free, online shipment notification aggregation service, by which I mean, it can provide to online shoppers, the ability to track their shipments in one place - instead of the websites of various shipping services - and - without the need to dig out tracking codes each time one wishes to track a shipment’s status.

The way this works is pretty simple. Shoppers need to forward their “Item shipped” notification emails from e-stores to the service, which then automatically uses the tracking codes in those emails to track shipments and update customers each time the status changes via email and/or SMS.

The TrackMyShipments’ algorithm extracts the shipper (eg Fedex) and tracking number automatically from the email without you having to do anything else.

After that you start to get email updates about where the package is, its status, its estimated arrival date etc. You never have to worry again about the status of your shipment.

I think this is a fantastic idea that online shoppers will love. I’m not sure how they plan to monetize their service. It’s free to use at the time, maybe a nominal fee for people with a lot of shipments to track or ads with SMSes and emails would be worth the kind of a service on offer.

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