Joost has finally become a truly web based video platform, no download required, videos can now be watched from the browser, which also makes joost linux-compatible at last!

Found this newteevee blog post under more items on techmeme. You tube, according to CEO Chad Hurley, is all set to use the affiliate marketing route as an additional monetization opportunity besides display ads.

Hurley said at an event in Palo alto that they are already integrating affiliate links to Amazon and iTunes within Music video and TV show videos

“We’re integrating links to iTunes and Amazon for DVDs, CDs, and digital downloads,” Hurley said. “A lot of our content does drive awareness for music or for TV shows or movies, and a lot of our partners are really just excited to make that connection between the two — going from promotional, getting people to tune into a TV show or buy a movie ticket — to that direct response in terms of clicking to buy something.”

More on NewTeeVee >

Users of Last.fm may have noticed that the web 2.0 radio is already doing something similar when you log in to the website to listen to music or watch videos, they’ve got affiliate links to amazon where users can buy the music.

Got a press release in the mail today about a new social shopping widget platform called CybaSumo. It’s a strange sounding name (somehow also the reason why I instantly wanted to check out the website), thankfully the release also had info on what it means.

The Name CybaSumo is ‘Formed by
combining the Latin words cyba for “merchant” and sumo for “to buy,” ‘

CybaSumo, essentially is a widget platform for shopping. What makes it unique is the fact that merchants and individuals can use it to sell both digital as well as physical goods for 2.5% per sale.

Tomorrow, they will officially turn this website into a social-shopping platform by letting people buy and sell - in a widget that can be embedded into social networks of your choice.

If you are looking to log-in to the website to buy stuff, don’t expect much, the site only has about ten sellers at the moment, however, it’s great to see such platforms come up every now and then. As I have mentioned in quite a few earlier posts and comments, I think it is ideas like these that take web 2.0 to the web 2.1. The “contribution economy”, where all user-generated content is monetizable - for the users, where a website (or widget, or social-network) is simply a platform for users to not only create content on, but also make money from it.

This is very exciting news. Everyone’s favorite affiliate network, ShareASale is hard at work on developing what they call a “v-commerce” solution - a video player/widget built for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing.

Carolyn Tang of SAS announced this to members of the shareasale group in facebook and is currently inviting ideas and suggestions in an ongoing facebook discussion here.

“we’re gettin’ with the times and exploring v-commerce. Nothing like bringing the magic of television online! Our tech team is hard at work developing a player with embedded tracking for affiliates to use on their sites.” ~ Carolyn Tang

It’s the social-shopping week, it seems. I already wrote about two new social shopping apps on facebook that launched this week. Now, it’s e-retail giant Amazon’s turn to get facebook users to social-shop.

“By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.”

In a news release earlier today, Amazon announced the launch of two new facebook applications - Giver and Grapevine. “Giver” lets users view their friends’ Amazon wishlists and share their own, “Grapewine” populates the user’s facebook feed with their activity on amazon.com (one gets choose what type of activity to share upon signing up).

“Use Amazon Giver to let your Facebook friends know and buy what you wish for, as well as gift suggestions, and Amazon Grapevine to show your friends what you’ve been up to on Amazon.com, such as writing Customer Reviews, adding items to your Wish List, and tagging products”

It would have been even more awesome if amazon had somehow added an affiliate marketing element to their facebook suite of apps. Say, if someone buys something on your wishlist by clicking on it - for someone else - you get the standard amazon associates revenue-share on the sale credited to your affiliate account. something like that would boost their apps’ usage and make social-shopping recommendations on facebook a lot more fun.

Social Shopping is Huge in China. “In China, 58% of all purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content such as consumer reviews and rating sites, forums and discussion boards, blogs and other UGC. In the US, only 19% of purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content.” (via emarketer)

Was browsing facebook and came across an interesting and simple little social shopping + affiliate marketing app that seems to be quite popular. Radicalbuy lets users buy and sell stuff on facebook, charges sellers a cut on sale.

The cool part about this is, that members who don’t have anything to sell can simply add stuff on their facebook profiles from other sellers and get a commission on every sale.

Utilizing the millions of members on Facebook, you can list an item and have it visible to all Facebook users instantly. After you list an item, others can post your listing on their Facebook page to earn commission! For example, if you sell a watch for $100.00, you may offer anyone 10% commission to sell it for you. If someone sells your watch for you, they get $10.00. The amount of commission you offer is entirely up to you.

They’ve also got widgets and stuff for embedding into blogs, but it’s the facebook potential of this thing that’s pretty huge. I’ll sign up and will probably write a review later this week. In the meantime, it’s a facebook application definitely worth a look whether you are an e-retailer or affiliate marketer or if you simply want to add cool products to your facebook profile, and make some cash in the process.

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

Google, today launched a new API, something that could be a revolutionary new tool for social apps and the social media in general — The Social Graph.

This latest API from google will allow developers of social apps grab what is normally the essential-most piece of a social-startup’s puzzle from the public web and that is the information of who knows whom. One way this can be used, according to google, is, for example if a new user signs up with your cool new social network — your network, thanks to the API, already knows whom that person knows and to how. So, all the friends of this new user who are already on your network, can automatically be in his/her buddy list there. Pretty cool huh?

I almost forgot to mention the most interesting part, All this, thanks to those ‘rel’ tags made oh so famous because of nofollow, in web links.

“Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site. “

Come to think of it, google has been, since the beginning, been using social graph data to make their SERPs look so good. however, the recent increased usage of XFN and FOAF data in these rel tags (XFN - the XHTML friends network and FOAF - Friend Of A Friend, are standards based linking meta-data mechanisms let you specify when you link to a URL, how are you related to the person who owns that URL) google has made it really easy for developers working on so many applications other than search to harness the usability of social linking.

More on: Google Code, Tech Crunch

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

Looks like overstock’s IP range has been banned at Wikipedia:

[Wikipedia] just blocked 65.116.112.0/21, which is an IP range (a) owned by Overstock.com (b) widely used by them for spamming, COI editing and attempted intimidation of administrators dealing with them.

Wikipedia bans Overstock.com - Gary Weiss has the full story ->

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

Apparently, This happened at least as early as 8th of this month.

Folks, remove Twitter from your list of PageRank sources and drop links for fun and traffic only. I wonder whether particular people change their linking behavior on Twitter or not. I won’t.

Just another victim of the nofollow plague (Sebastian’s Pamphlets)

[via Robert Scoble’s Link blog]

This is the new PPC - Pay Per Contribution.

I talked about NuVy.com here a few days ago, a social shopping network that pays users to upload video product reviews. Mashable, Today announced the launch of another social shopping network with a similar concept - to reward it’s users for contributing to the network - with cash.

Shoppero enables its users to write product reviews which get centrally bundled through the platform and can be advertised by users implementing adgets [widgets] in their own sites[and social network profiles, blogs, etc]. The resulting advertising revenues are being split among Shoppero.de and the users — The latter receiving 20% of the ad-revenues from the pages created by themselves and 60% of the ad-revenues generated by linking to the Shoppero portal. Reaching the minimum total of 25 Euros will trigger a payout to the user via PayPal at the end of the month.

This is (maybe not these particular websites, but the concept in general) the future of social networking - The basis of any economy, including what is being called the “Attention Economy” is, ultimately, Money. If users of a social network help them make money, the users MUST have a share in the revenues of the network.

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

———————

Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

On the 18th of June, which is today to most readers of this blog, a new social shopping network has been announced - Shoppingwords.com.

Don’t mind the overly dramatic introduction to this - the shopping network isn’t all that great. Just another social shopping network with a slightly unique approach to things in that unlike wists or thisnext, this isn’t quite a social bookmarking or comparison shopping service. it’s more like a 2.0 criaglist, a huge, free, discussion forum around ‘keywords’ related to shopping (the founders of this must be SEOs or something, hehe) that could be, by some miracles - that usually happen in social networks, turned into an actual marketplace.

For example, let’s check out the Thinkpad tablet page. 4 people with profiles want to buy it. one person already has bought the computer. and one person has changed her mind about the product. there are also two comments on the product page with people suggesting other, similar products. That means, for now atleast, this isn’t quite an online shopping aid, more of a shopping research platform that plans to use the wisdom of crowds in helping people make buying decisions.

IMO, the website could start using a better design and get rid of the google adsense clutter if they would like to be considered as a worthy application by shoppers worldwide.

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

More and more web-apps are getting on the television screen. The latest is e-Bay, at least for time warner cable’s subscribers.

eBay on TV

The Internet’s first big affiliate network - Linkshare, is also one of the first affiliate networks to be able to adapt itself to the new internet.

Linkshare is currently beta testing an ad network that they will be opening up to bloggers and product review sites called Linkshare Showcase. This network will focus on specific products from leading merchants and allow publishers to highly customize the ads with features and reviews. Publishers will be able to choose which products they want to recommend to their users from participating merchants

Reports Salvo.ws

Linkshare showcase is what will probably be a linkshare sub-network targeted towards bloggers and other web2.0 ish content heavy websites that will offer:

• One simple interface for choosing the products you want.
• One small piece of Javascript to copy and paste onto your site.
• LinkShare Showcase is optimized for peak performance.
• No waiting for your money. Fast payments, from the first $1.

There are, of course, other companies that offer such advertising networks, linkshare, however, is the first major affiliate network to talk about offering widget-merchandizing besides shareasale, which started offering widget ads earlier this month

Sam Harrelson, publisher of popular internet marketing blog Cost per news and CEO of PlanetBeta has just launched a brand new online publication for affiliate marketers at Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Affiliate Fortune cookies is a “affiliate marketing tip/hack/tricks blog” that aims at “lowering the currently high threshold that keeps many people out of our industry.” - how this will be done, is explained in the blog’s first first post:

Affiliate Fortune Cookies is a blog where we’re going to be throwing out quick and easy tips, tricks and hacks to help out both newbie’s and old pro’s alike.

So, the experience level required to understand posts will range from absolutely none to fairly advanced understanding of algo’s and CJ inner workings. However, there will be something here for every affiliate marketer looking to stay up on the latest tips.

Definitely a blog I recommend subscribing to, I have already subscribed and placed it among the first blogs I read in my netvibes page. If you are an Affiliate-manager, I also recommend advertising on AFC, it’s only $250 for 2 months, and if an affiliate signs up to your program via AFC, you know that affiliate is going to be a top-performer!.

This one is a bit different, unlike the competition that I wrote about here in the past, Adapt.tv serves ads for video, but the ads themselves are not video ads, they are simply static images or text with a link that are displayed pre and/or post-roll. Since there is no video being played in the advertisement, the network runs on the friendlier cost per click model rather than the newer to the internet advertising industry model of cost per view.

Metacafe will be the first video network to use Adap.TV ads

Their About page states “The company uses advanced technology that adapts in real time to consumers’ interests and their viewing behaviors”. How exactly this done, is not mentioned.

[via NewTeeVee]

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

PRWeb, the online press release distribution service has announced the launch of “BlogThis” - A new tool that allows bloggers who comment on PRWeb news releases on their blogs to blog directly using PRweb’s interface.

A new “BlogThis” button is displayed next to every press release on prweb.com, upon clicking which, one is asked their blog type, url and username/password - this leads to a simple wordpress-like text box where a blogger can write the contents of their blog-post. Click post, and you’re done. PRWeb posts your post to your blog with an image, link and a track back to the original PRweb story to your blog like a good third party blogging app. The only drawback I can see is not being able to choose catagories/tags while posting.

Click here to read the press release

Just stumbled across the twitter profile of DealTwit. A Coupon code microblog on twitter that regularly twitters coupon codes from e-retail merchants - one can ask for a specific merchant’s coupon code by sending a direct twitter and DealTwit promises to respond.

Dealtwit is the second “revenue” twitter microblog I have seen, the first being Twitterlit - who is “Twittering the first lines of books so you don’t have to”.

Smart affiliates have finally begun monetizing twitter, and they are doing it in very creative ways. This is good stuff, Affiliate marketing 2.0.

I’m not sure how much success this can be, Dealtwit only has 17 followers as of now, Twitterlit, on the other hand, has as many as 109 followers, both have taken the right step in a direction. These guys are branding themselves. The days of anonymously marketing merchants are going away as more and more affiliates realize the importance of building a brand and eventually monetizing it.

ReviewMe, where advertisers can buy reviews of their products/services/websites on blogs, has just launched what the call the Advertiser Marketplace in a move to attract more advertisers and bloggers to their systems.

Originally, The ReviewMe model would let bloggers put a pricetag on reviews on their blog, and advertisers would select which blog they’d like to be reviewed by.

While the original way of advertising is still in place, the new system lets advertisers set up campaigns and provide details of what they would like reviews for and offer a fixed price per review for any blogger within the reviewme network to pick up. Competitor payperpost, currently employs a very similar system within their blog advertising network.

Just saw this on techcrunch. Looks like e-Bay’s answer to AuctionAds. Not sure if it’s possible to integrate tracking code into the widgets, but I’m sure that’s comming soon. Meanwhile, the widget is great for ebay sellers with blogs and web-stores.

I’m addicted to twitter, and today’s post will be twitter style, a few “tweets” in this post. Each less than 140 characters.

• More affiliate programs starting affiliate blogs every day - the latest is Kodak - http://kodakaffiliate.blogspot.com
• Ebay to roll out a brand new feedback system - http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m04/i26/s01
• Affiliate marketing jagron - http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/glossary-of-affiliate-marketing-terms/
• [social network] Web 2.0 site lets users send virtual scratch cards -
• http://www.prweb.com//releases/web2-0/sweepstakes/prweb522060.htm
• The Google reader theme is very cool!
• New BumpZee! Features
• Top 10 reasons why web 2.0 sucks

Sam Harrelson and Wayne Porter announced on the first of april about Vinny Lingham’s Incubeta acquiring Revenews and CostPerNews, For two days, I thought this was an april fool’s joke.

Apparently, it wasn’t. The Planetbeta blog is now live with some clues on what the latest new-media entity is going to be all about.

Popular blog about all things web 2.0, CenterNetworks, is making an offer startups can’t refuse - you can now promote your startup idea and be talked about at the blog for free.

All startups will need to do is to make a video pitching the startup, the benefits, why do you think it’s going to be the next big thing, etc., and send it to the Centernetworks. In return, Centernetworks will post the video on their blog, review and write about your startup - which has to be less than 2 years old and not a public company to qualify.

Finally, all the videos will go through a competition, a panel of judges will select be best video, the creator of which will win a 2 month advertising slot (May/June) on CenterNetworks

[Via Press Release]

Was just checking my email - and today is the day when I check the “Spam” folder to see if any important emails has accidentally been filtered as spam - There were none, Gmail’s filter is fantastic.

However, there was one email titled “Red Herring Ballmer Trash” that cought my attention, so I decided to click and see what the spam is all about - and the message turns out the be the FIRST EVER Web 2.0 Spam ever received (by me).

If you haven’t seen it in your mailbox yet, here’s what I saw:

Science scoble, scripting? Jboss jobs jotspot joyce jruby js json kawasaki kids.

Grid, groovy gwt hackdays hacks haiku hardware. Ask aspectj atlas atom, attend attention.Email from grave seeks immortal.Presenting preso presos press wordpress pricing print.

Beagle beta, bio biology bitter blog blogging.

Earth ebay eclipse ecommerce! Apps aprilst article ask aspectj atlas? Ads adsapi adsense adverisign adwords.

Evangelist ex exo fashion feed feedback fetcher.

Stress, struts sun, sund sundd sunpeople svg? Http humor in ide. Regexp religion, remix rest restaurant results ria? Stock storage store strategy stress. Oscommerce, oss ossgtp overture ozzie. Local longtail longterm, ma, mac mail man management mano.

Cloud listraquo sort by alpha, freqraquo use minimum. Dorothee, dotnet, drawing, drive, drm dsl dvd earth.

Going, screw them if, they dont, do you.

Pg philosophy, phone, photo photos php. Mapreduce maps, marcou marketing mashup mashupcamp mashups maven medecine?

Fantastic article on the Lightspeed venture partners’ blog.

Categorizes Internet users in two categories, the “Time rich” and the “TIme poor”.

I’d speculate that many of the readers of this blog fall into the Time Poor category, but the vast majority of internet users fall into the Time Rich category. If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people guide you wrong.

Rest of the article here …

According to this press release, StumbleUpon is now over two million users strong.

I’ve been reading many bloggers write about how stumbleupon makes up such an important share of their traffic referrers pie.

It’s too bad I haven’t been active at stumbleupon yet - hopefully, this piece of news is enough inspiration for me to go and check out the service and make some use of it’s mammoth potential as a source of traffic.

I was reading iCon, a Steve Jobs biography, have only read the first few pages yet, but having already read so much about apple - something passed my mind that I guess is worth sharing here.

There is all this hype over social media, and social networks etc., as if it is the one true way to successful business and brand-development. The way most people are taking this, is they are taking niches and turning them into communities and social networks.

What Apple did, however (and Sony, and BMW, and Reliance and even Microsoft to a certain extent), is that they carried on their business the traditional way, yet they were heavily engaged in what can be noted as “Social marketing”.

How exactly they did this, I am yet to grasp an understanding of, but they did not host social networks, that’s a certain fact.

Let me end this post with a Guruish comment:

Social marketing is not hosting a social network, nor creating one, it is building a sense of community within all those who use your products.

That, IMO is the sure-shot technique of building any business and REAL social marketing - Creating a sense of belonging and passion towards your product in the minds of everyone who uses it, that way, they start bonding with all those who use the same product. This creates a sort of missionary inclination into your users - who try and “convert” more people into using your product.

“visual shopping” web-apps are mushrooming around the web; with a hope to offer a better and more unique shopping experience to online buyers (and make money in the process too).

Browsegoods, for example and lets users browse products on amazon as if they were browsing a map on google maps - you can zoom in and out of product category maps. The more you zoom in, the more products you get to see, once you have decided upon a product, zoom into the product to see more information about it. Very interesting concept, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look.

Other visual shopping apps worthy of a mention include BlackDogAir (lets shoppers browse through Books movies and music as if they were browsing a windows explorer window for files) and of course the already popular Like.com that recognizes stuff people are wearing in photos and displays similar products available to buy on various stores in their database (which, it seems is populated with datafeeds from affiliate networks etc.).

Today, yet another “Visual shopping experience” has launched, this time built on top of the shopping.com API, from the labs of mpire, called Shopwave.

If you are a regular user of Apple’s iPhoto or Google’s Picasa, you are already familiar with the shopwave interface.

From their blog-post:

Shopwave is an experiment focusing specifically on the use of product images versus text and lists

Upon entering shopwave, shoppers can select to browse either product categories or popular searches. Click a category or search term to view a list of product thumbnail images that one can zoom into, move the mouse over a thumbnail and product info is displayed on the right side of the web-page (along with a more info button that takes shoppers to the main shopping comparison website). One can also browse products using a not so cool “filmstrip” view instead of zoom-able thumbnails.

Visual shopping, as far as my thinking goes, is the next logical step in online shopping, These apps are rather raw as of now and it may take time for shoppers to adapt to such new mechanisms, but not as much as it may look like, It’d more more like switching to a mac - you are using it for the first time, but you already know how to. Your brain, your subconscious knows. The way we use the web is becoming easier each day - these things are, I am sure, the 2.0 of online shopping.

Sam, over at costpernews just blogged about ScanScout - a service that, unlike other video advertising networks out there, displayes contextual ads in videos. Apparently, clickable ads are displayed at the bottom of the video player on the basis of spoken keywords and tags .

As I was reading the costpernews post, The RSS reader popped up a story on GigaOM about the launch of another contextual video ad network - YuMe. Which is probably the only competition to ScanScout as of now.

Unlike ScanScout, however, YuMe targets ads based on tags and metadata and this is not entirely automated - YuMe Staff actually screens user generated video before placing ads in there to ensure “Brand safety”.

Another very interesting feature they are boasting about is geo-targeting, advertisers can select exactly where there ads will be seen and can show different versions of the ad in different zip codes.

Online video advertising (and monetization) is getting real huge real quick, and IMO these two companies - ScanScout and YuMe have come up with some fantastic innovation.

Very interesting post on Sam Harrelson’s Blog - Cost Per News

The idea of going to a specific “search engine” or “search site” in a few years will seem as stupid as dialing in to an AOL server to get on the internets. We’re going to be talking about “the good old Google days” soon enough.

Google is our generation’s AOL, I fear.

Read Full Article here

PayPerPost, one of the preferred revenue sources for many bloggers now has an affiliate program, and it’s kind of unique how they plan to implement it.

If you are a ‘Postie’ or a PPP member, you can make $7.50 for every blogger who signs up with them via your referral, but there is a slight difference in how you do this.

Bloggers who plan to promote PayPerPost via the new affiliate program will be required to place a ‘Review My Post’ button on the bottom of their posts. Any non-postie blogger can click on button, join PPP and write a review of your post on their own blog - and get paid $7.50 for doing so. On the other hand, the postie who’s post is reviewed also gets $7.50 as referral commission.

Seth Godin calls it a cross between Ebay, Criaglist and Netflix - for charity. SwitchPlanet.com, Currently in beta, is yet another addition to the emerging number of “social swapping” websites.

The Elegantly designed website lets users swap things you own with things you want with other members. Already, the website has catalogued thousands of CDs, DVDs, and Video Games that are up for barter.

They are not charging any transaction fees or service fees etc, all services offered on the website are free to use - that’s where the “charity” part kicks in; Each time you trade using SwitchPlanet, you are requested (but not required) to donate to the SwitchFund (donations to the switchfund are then redirected to select charity organizations).

I have my own open ID now! , I’m using this blog as my open ID (which was actually/originally registered via myopenid.com). I think that it’s very cool that I can now use this blog’s URL as my one true login name and password.

In case you don’t yet know that open id is, head over to www.openid.net, where everything is explained in detail - but very basically, if you have an open id, and if you come across a website or online application that requires you to sign up in order to use it, but it also support open ID, you just provide your open ID URL, and your registration is done. no need to fill up another form, you can also login using the same openid URL every time you use it.

Anyway, now that I have an open ID, I was looking for places to use it, I know it can be used on wikipedia, livejournal and AOL - places I don’t visit too often. Since openid is such a new concept, not many large websites have adopted the concept yet(many are planning to, however). so I googled and googled but found nothing, finally, stumbled across something via a search on del.icio.us - a neat user-powered digg style website that lists quite a few areas of the web that are openid enabled some new and interesting web 2.0 concepts and overall, very cool stuff is to be discovered there.

here’s the link

There’s a new dictionary on the web, and it’s cool, it’s not beta, but it’s social and I think I like it.

Word source, is a new online dictionary with some features that aren’t normally associated with dictionaries.

First of all, it’s very easy to use, all you need to do is type www.word.sc/(word) into your browser to look up for definitions and thesaurus entries; Besides, the site itself has a zen-like appearance, has no ads and is more or less to the point.

Then, there is the 2.0 part of the dictionary - they call this wordsourcelive, you can “like” or “dislike” any word in the dictionary, you can tag a word, you can associate a picture to any word in the dictionary by uploading it and of course, in the process, you can become a part of the newest social network idea on the web.