Wikipedia bans overstock’s IPs for spamming.

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 ->

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The Official eBay facebook App goes live

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…

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Twitter goes the No-Follow route

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]

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Shoppero.com - A Social Shopping Network that Pays Back

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.

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

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.

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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.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

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!

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New social shopping network: ShoppingWords.com

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.

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

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]

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Affiliate Marketing at Yahoo Answers

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!

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eBay on TV for Time Warner Cable customers

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

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