Will cut larger checks, save paper.

Effective August 28, Affiliate network CJ will pay affiliates only once they have accumulated a minimum of $100 in commissions - in an effort towards eco-friendliness -  from the current minimum of $25, the new minimum direct deposit amount, however remains at $50. 

Smaller affiliates, especially in parts of the world where CJ doesn’t not provide a Direct deposit facility will have to wait longer to see their commission money.

The changes are as follows:

It’s good to see that CJ is showing concern towards the environment, but they should really think about providing direct deposit or paypal to countries besides the US, UK, canada and a few others. Affiliates in these parts of the world will still have to order checks.

Froogle - Google Product Search, which launched as Froogle many years ago as a price comparison shopping engine later changed it’s format to a simple product search engine that would display the stores that sell a product you are searching for, without grouping the stores that sell the searched product according to prices, but simply in random algorithmic order - each product listing displaying a merchant-specific description and other details.

This was probably because froogle would, at the time, crawl e-stores for price and product information and the index was anything but accurate. Since introducing google base, the product search engine has stopped crawling the web for product info, it instead relies on data-feeds submitted by merchants - in a manner much similar to Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other price comparison sites. Despite the added accuracy, few people actually use google’s product search feature independently of the top-three product listings that appear within universal search.

Now, again, google seems to be experimenting with the price comparison engine format, complete with one description, and product specs per product - which is great news shoppers - there is now a real price comparison engine that includes more buying options than any other out there. As for merchants, most of whom already have their datafeeds uploaded to google base, This would be one of the few price comparison sites that is completely free - merchants don’t pay for clicks or sales, and if your store offers competitive prices, all the better, expect additional traffic!

Not all searches are showing up as price comparison results, but more SERPs are changing their skin real quick. Probably not very long before the transition is completed.

Affiliates who use GoldenCAN to enable dynamically updated coupons and products from merchant programs will no longer need to display a “powered by goldencan” link on pages with goldencan’s code. Good Move!

Yahoo testing “Ads by google” with US search queries http://tinyurl.com/5q4hyb

In what is a giant leap in it’s mobile-commerce offerings, Amazon launched “Amazon TextBuyIt” yesterday - Something that will let customers find, and make purchases via something as simple as text messages.

“With today’s launch of TextBuyIt, any Amazon.com customer can now use any mobile device to shop and buy from Amazon.com, at anytime, anywhere they are”

How, Simply text a message to “AMAZON” (262966), with the name of the product (or UPC/ISBN, if you have those), search results - with product name, a single digit code, and prices - are immediately texted back to your phone. Reply to amazon’s reply with the single digit code amazon sent for the product that is to be purchased. That’s it! If it’s the first time you’re using the number to buy something you are asked your amazon.com account details from where amazon picks up your shipping and billing info, and calls you up to confirm the order)

There is a discussion going on here about the new service, the first few reviews seem positive. One of the comments made me think, we’re already into the ‘future’. “Imagine when you are wandering inside a BestBuy or circuitCity Store and really like some item and begin to wonder if you will find a better deal on Amazon… well, now you can just send an SMS and Voila!”

More on Text Buy It:
FAQs
Press Release

Update: Discussion also at Techcrunch

Amazon’s EC2 servers get more usable for smaller web developers with static ip addresses now available, Elastic IP Addresses -> Amazon

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.

Europe Clears Google’s DoubleClick Bid

BIG NEWS: AOL gets into affiliate marketing, buys buy.at. [Via Cost Per News]

According to an email sent out to it’s affiliates by the giant online shoe store - Zappos, they are no longer going to offer free overnight shipping on the web-store.

We will no longer be promoting “Free Overnight Shipping” and we no longer will be promoting our price protection policy. Instead, we will be focusing more on our “free shipping” and our expanding selection of merchandise.

Earlier last year, Zappos started offering this facility to customers only a few days after Amazon announced their entry into the shoe retail business with Endless.com, a store owned by amazon that sells shoes and handbags, and ships overnight for free.

Clearly, Zappos seems to have come to realize that offering overnight shipping for free just because a new entrant in the market, albeit run by an e-retail pioneer, is offering such a scheme to get a share of the shoes and handbags pie, is just not profitable enough, even after doing Over $800 mm in sales in 2007.

Amazon, with is vast and diversified nature of business can afford to sell on very small margins. That, however, should not mean death for other e-retailers. IMO the future of e-retail is not in giant malls, but niche stores that know their product and can offer a quality of customer service that is at par with or better than big e-retail entities. By that, I don’t mean Amazon is the big brother or something, they are in fact doing a great job as a huge mall, and as endless - they run a fantastic niche store.

What I didn’t like is that Zappos quickly got afraid of amazon entering the market and started offering free overnight shipping, only to abandon the scheme later. If a niche store can’t afford the margins of their competition, they should work on bettering their product and service rather than copying their competition’s marketing tactics that they can’t handle.

Blogged with Flock

It’s already on techmeme, but if you missed it, Google has launched a way for webmasters to let them know if you have video content on your website.

No longer waiting for google to figure out that you host your own video, or uploading your content to youtube etc just so that it appears on google’s video search result pages. It is now possible to simply tell google to crawl your video pages for indexing into video.google.com and possibly also universal search.

More on the google webmaster blog > 

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

In an effort to further curb the sales of links and pagerank for SEO, google has banned all adwords ads that are used to sell text link advertisements targeted towards selling a shortcut to better google rankings.

Before:

After:

this change in implementation is in accordance with Google’s existing AdWords and Webmaster guidelines. The AdWords guidelines stated “Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of … search engine spamming,” pointing to the webmaster guidelines for further definitions of unacceptable techniques… and the webmaster help pages state “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.”

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

The new Get Links interface enables affiliates to use links right away, rather than generating the links before using them.

In order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season, the new interface is being made available concurrently with Performics’ legacy links interface.

More details on the Affiliatetip blog by Shawn Collins

Valueclick’s affiliate network, Commission Junction recently announced something that might delight many international affiliates - the inclusion of nine more countries to the places where CJ will send payments as direct deposits straight to the affiliate’s bank account.

This facility was previously only available to affiliates in the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden and the UK.
The list will now also include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada (USD option added), France, Ireland(CHF) , Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland

From the notice posted on the CJ account manager interface:

Commission Junction has updated our payment method options; publishers are now able to choose to receive payment via direct deposit in nine new banking countries. Direct deposit offers fast and free delivery of your commissions earned through Commission Junction. Payments are made after the 20th of every month.

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:

I was about “bulk accept” new program terms for some merchants on CJ, when I decided to randomly click on a merchant’s name and see what the new commission structure was.

The Merchant I clicked on happened to be 6PM.com - the shoe and handbags merchant that’s been on CJ for a few years and has always had performed okayish - both networkwide and for me.

Looks like a lot of people won’t be promoting them any more. Take a look at the screenshot yourself before you hear about their new deal with CJ affiliates from me.

Yep, what used to be 13% per sale is now $0.00.

Makes you wonder how and why the network - CJ - is allowing this. how would they make money off a $0 commission!?

Maybe it’s just a mistake - even if it is, that means a lost commissions for 6PM affiliates Just emailed 6PM’s Affiliate manager to see if I get a response. If it is not a mistake, that means 6PM is basically - instead of shutting down it’s program, trying to see if they can get some traffic from affiliates - without having to pay for it.

Update: got an email just a few hours after posting this that their affiliate program has been suspended. Reason - the company is now being operated by new owners.

Mashable reports that Amazon might be launching it’s DRM free music download service on or around September 17th. Armed with the music catalogs of music giants Universal and EMI and selling most tracks for 99 cents or less, there are some reasons worth considering on why Amazon could become the next leader in the music download space.

• Amazon already sells a lot of music and media on CDs, and has all the necessary infrastructure and customers for this new service.
• Amazon loves APIs and webservices, it won’t be long before developers and amazon affiliates will be able to create interesting apps using ECS (Amazon’s webservice for that allows developers to access their product-related data), who knows, someone might even create an iTunes plugin that integrates amazon to your iTunes/iPod.
• This is entirely DRM free music, which means it’s not windows-only unlike many many other iTunes competitors out there, amazon will be delivering a truly cross-platform music download service.

What do you think? Does Amazon have what it takes to become the next iTunes?

Just got my beta invite from my live search - a search engine startup that claims to be the “first true live search engine”.

I’d been looking forward for this beta launch for some time, and was pretty excited upon getting the email with a username and password to test out the brand new SE. I logged in from an ubuntu desktop with firefox that I use as my primary computer at work. What do I see upon logging in? not a search engine, but this:

Your browser/operating system is not currently supported by Mylivesearch.

Wow! a search engine is supposed to be the most basic of web-apps. heh, what are these guys thinking by not supporting, of all things, the firefox browser?!

Update: Just checked again from a kubuntu laptop with firefox, looks like they are supporting firefox now, but I still can’t search from the linux OS - Mac and Linux support, is coming soon, states the page I am shown in place of any search results.

heh, A couple of days ago, Apple announced increased email (and iDisk) storage for .Mac Members - from 1GB originally to a new limit of 10 GB. Today, Google Blogoscoped posts that

Some (gmail users) are reporting that Gmail is now showing almost 9 gigabyte (9,030 MB, to be exact)

Makes me wonder why the gmail team would even bother looking at what is happening at .Mac - everything google gives away for free, .Mac is selling at 99.95/year - although some people, so heavily influenced by apple’s reality distortion, actually pay for it - that is a crowd too small to consider.

Maybe it’s just a co-incidence, nothing to do with what happened with .Mac a few days ago, but an interesting co-incidence nonetheless.

Since apple announced the new iMacs a few hours ago today, I couldn’t help checking out the apple website and see what cool new features and sexy new looks the new iMacs have.

of all the fancy stuff, one thing in particular listed on the imac’s tech specs page is something that I think would be ultra-cool to have in a new computer –

The 24 inch model has

Optional 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive

I must have re-read that sentence like 5 times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, a 1 TB hard drive running at full 7200 rpm speed? Cool!

Not Google, not Facebook, I nominate Amazon for the best Web 2.x Success story award.

The betting before Amazon.com posted second-quarter earnings was that it couldn’t live up to the 80% uptick in its stock price so far this year. But the rising number of short-sellers who have been hoping for Amazon’s comeuppance took it in the shorts instead. Amazon’s stunning 257% jump in profits on a 35% rise in sales surprised even the bulls. Its stock is up more than 8% almost 12% in the initial minutes after the market closed.

Amazon Blows ‘Em Away Again - BusinessWeek

Of course, the reason Amazon is my favorite web 2.x -enabled company because it adapted itself so quickly and so perfectly to the changing internet, that it would have gone unnoticed if their earnings didn’t reflect all this growth. They have been into open web services, affiliate marketing, user generated content, and all the web 2.x buzzword things since even before those words were first used.

Relatively new affiliate network with some cool merchants, Avantlink, just pushed out this press release.

Online marketers that qualify for AvantLink have free access to the tools, which are standardized across all merchant programs. Affiliate API modules currently include AffiliateReport, AffiliateReportRss, GetLinkCampaigns, ProductPriceCheck, and ProductSearch.

Which means they’re basically offering everything in the api that an affiliate could ask for!

Congratulations to avantlink on the launch.

As of right now, we have CJ in the top tier of affiliate networks with a functional API, Avantlink, a mid-tier network has one. Who’s next? Shareasale, I’m hoping…

I’m mostly certain linkshare is going to not upgrade what it calls an api to what an affiliate network’s api should be.

More on the avantlink api here.

That’s According to the WSJ:

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

Happy Blogiversary!

(from the six month old blog - FinalTag.com to all Bloggers and Blog readers worldwide!)

TechCrunch Reports that a web 2.0 digg clone for deals - Trezr.com is selling on eBay.

Trezr has a rather clever way of making money, by monetizing outbound links through affiliate programs with Commission Junction, Linkshare, Amazon, and Performics. However, the site hasn’t generated significant traffic since launch at the end of last year.

The reason why they haven’t generated traffic enough to be able to run the website - is because there are TONS of such similar websites on the internet. There’s dealigg, chitika just launched a website that does exactly the same thing, there are at least 4 or 5 such other “digg clones for deals” that I won’t even try and remember the names of - have come and gone in the last two years. These things can’t work - certainly can’t be superhit ventures unless something that is very unique and very useful that is being offered.

Web 2.0 success is based on one rule - Innovate, don’t clone.

According to the Red herring blog, Google’s Marissa Mayer said at a silicon valley conference yesterday that the search giant is using google’s automated free 411 service - 1-800-GOOG-411 - to strengthen their software’s voice recognition capabilities and eventually use speech in videos to enhance video search results.

Eventually, google aims to further improve video search by adding visual search to the mix - in which google’s indexing software “searches through the images in the video for patterns, matching faces to another image, etc.”.

History repeating itself? Google was the first search engine to ignore author generated meta-tags in “Web 1.0″ pages and rely heavily on pagerank instead. In video, Google seems to not want to rely on user-generated tags to index video as soon as they have the capability for a more advanced method, which they are already developing.

More on the Red herring blog

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

Video: Surface computing from Microsoft. One can see unlimited possibilities once this thing is out in the market and ideas as applications are built on top of this platform.

Today, at invite-only searchology event at Google headquarters, Google has announced some huge changes that are being made to the world’s #1 Internet search engine.

The new and improved google is being called “Universal search” Search results for books, local, video, news and images are now integrated right into the main google interface.

Checkout the full coverage of this by the blogosphere here (link to techmeme)

(image from techcrunch)

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!.

Techcrunch reports that ebay is all set to pay out twice as much in affiliate commissions to smaller affiliates and the number going even further upwards for larger affiliates, starting June 1.

However, with the increased payouts, eBay has also published new Ts and Cs stating that search marketers may no longer send PPC traffic directly to eBay. Affiliates will need to build landing pages to eBay via which they may route their paid search traffic.

The Terms and Conditions will include this new clause:

a. Search Engines. You will not be compensated for paid search traffic purchased from Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, nor from any of their content networks, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN ContentAds, if it is linked directly to the eBay.com, eBay Express, or eBay Store domains (not “Commission Earning Activity”). The change in policy is limited to the eBay.com US program, and to the three search engines stated above. Linking to a non eBay domain is allowed.

Two months after eBay set up a new entity in Luxembourg, its PayPal subsidiary was granted a banking license for the European Union by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) in Luxembourg.

Reports AuctionBytes.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg have awarded PayPal a banking licence, and the ebay company will be moving their headquarters over to Luxembourg early next month.

This is big news, PayPal have maintained from the start that they are not a bank, but a mere payment facilitator, that doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.

Paypal has been operating in Europe for years without requiring to be recognized as a bank, neither were there any news recently that paypal would need to become a bank if they are to operate in europe.

PayPal said on Tuesday that the new banking license would allow it to continue its European expansion by offering its services to more online merchants across Europe.

It would be interesting to watch PayPal in the coming months. Who knows, they might even apply for bank status in the US and other parts of the e-commerce enabled world - Google checkout has suddenly become a major player out of nowhere in a market where paypal was a near monopoly, looks like this is one smart move to stay competitive, We should see some major slashes in paypal fees and some google checkout-like offers to attract merchants to use paypal soon!.

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

Details on google reader’s blog, here

Looks like Amazon’s A9 has re-incarnated. When they had abandoned the fantastic A9 toolbar a few months ago, I thought that they would also slowly kill the search engine.

That, evidently is not the case. Amazon has given A9 a complete makeover and is now calling it’s web search technology - where users can search multiple search engines in multiple frames - ajaxified, “opensearch” . It is being called opensearch because, it seems, that amazon is offering this search aggragation technology to developers as a web service under the creative commons liscence via opensearch.org

A9 now also has a product search feature built as an option right into the main search query box, one that searches Amazon for products, no surprise there!

Also being promoted heavily on the new main page is click river - amazon’s version of adwords which has been around for a while (that lets advertisers advertise on amazon pages and A9)

Great news for mac users! The open source office suite is coming to a Macintosh near you, Sun is planning to port a native version of OO.o for aqua.

When I was on a mac, I used neo office, a distro of OO.o tailored for the mac, but I guess having the original would be a much better idea. Neo office did crash often and was in constant beta. I am not on an ubuntu box which comes pre-installed with the Openoffice.org suite of apps - a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation app and a database app - all of them, even if they’re not as user friendly as MS office, are very stable and get the work done, I suppose an aqua open office would be much better to look at than the one on ubuntu or windows.

From the announcement on Sun’s blog:

Some may ask: Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port. The new invigorated effort in Mac/Aqua-porting (basically since CWS aquavcl01) is an obvious indicator. I think this is the right way to go to make OOo on Mac as good as or even better than the other ports. Add in the growing Mac community as a whole and suddenly from Sun’s point of view Mac has a higher value since our strategy is to be multi-platform capable.

John Battelle posted this screenshot of yahoo search results, sent by a reader from the UK, to his blog. Apparently, the new design can only be seen as of now, from a
UK ip address on yahoo’s international website (not the UK version).

Yahoo has been “ajaxifying” it’s layout quite a bit lately, but this new design looks like a major change in what hasn’t changed in many years.

Now I guess one should expect a modern look at a search engine that offers RSS feeds for search result pages!

…lets webmasters tell the search engine which parts of a web page contains it’s main content and which part is ment for, say navigation, ads, etc.

If adopted by the webmaster community, this should greatly help improve the quality of search results at Y!’s search engine. (and should also work as a nice SEO trick!)

More details here

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it’s important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.

(From the post on YsearchBlog announcing the tag)

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.

Their account manager was down for 6 hours straight today, and they’re not talking about it, not during the down time, not after it.

When I finally am able to log into CJ, I KNOW that I made double the sales CJ is reporting for yesterday. Again, there’s nothing in the notifications area mentioning that they faced some issues, nothing is the brand new RSS feed they launched, not one email to publishers. Nothing?

WTF, CJ?

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

I noticed this morning that the number of technorati members that had favorited this blog had gone up from 5 to 40! At first, I thought this was some error with technorati, but quickly realized that there was a meme going on, via Vlad’s post

So, a huge thanks to all those who have added FinalTag.com to their technorati favorites. I would have been really time consuming to add each blog who favorited this blog manually, so I took a tip from Vlad, and used this OPML file to populate my favorites list with everyone who is a part of the technorati favorites exchange meme (which took my list of technorati favorites to 1600+).

Update: Andy beard has detailed how to use the OPML file to import technorati favorites

is now rebranded as “Doubleclick performics” with a green color logo and website design - ending the rumors that post Doubleclick’s merger with google, the company would be trashed.

(Before)

(After)

Sam and Shawn have the complete story.

Google has announced in an email to froogle merchants (sent a couple hours ago), that the froogle.com brand is now called “Google Product Search” and has a new address at http://www.google.com/products (which is where the froogle.com domain now redirects)

The product search is also in beta, just like froogle was for as long as I can remember. Google was unable to brand froogle well, and looks like they are going to use the Google brand to get their product search engine more visibility than froogle.

There is also a new interface along with the name-change, search filtering options (such as filtering results from one brand or in a certain price range) now appear at the bottom of the search results as against on the top in froogle, at the top of SERPs however, there is only one filter option displayed prominently - “Show Google checkout items only”. The google checkout icons in search results are also somehow, more visible.