Here’s what I’m talking about.  The new app for Google Goggles.  Take a photo and get the details.

Whats your thoughts on this technology and its future?

Paper.li allows you to sign in with your twitter account and gives you three options to produce a daily newspaper based on the information you want to read. You can:

• Add you name and create a newspaper about you and your social network (like this one: The Justin Parks Daily)
• Add in a #hashtag that you monitor or wish to keep a good eye on and you read about alot.
• Add a Twitter list of specific people you want to read about daily.

*Word of warning, paper.li is still in Alpha testing, you can only do this with 5 different names, lists or #hashtags!  So DON’T waste them!

The end product is split into different sections for Business, Media, Technoloy and such and includes your own tweets in there (if you created a paper on your own twitter account name) and the thing I like about this is definitely the format as its familiar and similar to reading a newspaper.  the newspaper updates everyday andso once you create it then you just have to return to that URL and you can read the updates anew.

It will probably change some more as it moves through the testing stages but as far as I am concerned its already looking good. Nice job!

Basically, when two websites start sharing revenue to sell a product or service, it is known as affiliate marketing. Amazon was the one of the world’s first recognised and trusted sites to start large-scale affiliate marketing with affiliates get paid anywhere between 4-50% for sales generated through their own websites. Payment is typically recorded and made at the end of each month on the number of registrations, leads or sales or as a combination of the above depending on the method agreed between the merchant (the supplier) and the affiliate (the vendor).

Affiliate marketing works by cookies.  Not the type that have little bits of chocolate embedded inside them but rather, a small file, with little titbits of information that store essential data relevant to a person who clicks on the buy button on a vendors website .The cookie is saved in the person’s computer and this facilitates the tracking. When a sale is done then the vendor gets paid the amount of commission agreed and the whole record is stored in a CRM (Client Relationship Manager) available 24 hours a day to the vendor.

Incorporated into the CRM for affiliates get their daily statistics and reports on the number of clicks, sales, leads etc. Affiliate marketing connects buyers and sellers. This is how online marketing works. The amount of money spent online is increasing day by day. E-commerce is picking up at a very fast rate worldwide.

Britons spent a record £14.7 billion over the web last year – up 35 per cent, or nearly ten times the rate of growth of the total retail market. The number of people who bought goods online also increased by 24.7 per cent to 22.6 million, research shows. And they are spending over the internet more regularly – an average of 16.9 times in 2007, up from 14.2 times in 2006. Cheaper broadband and better availability of the service also lead to the increases, analysts Verdict Research claimed.

Affiliate marketing in the UK grew by 25% during 2008, taking the total value of online sales generated by this channel for that year to £3.82 billion*. The same report found that UK merchants involved in affiliate marketing drive 12% of their online sales via this channel and that despite the recession the affiliate marketing industry was worth well over £4bn by the end of 2009 and is expected to be even larger by the end of 2010 overall.

Valueclick, the owners of the affiliate networks Commission Junction, shopping.net, PriceRunner along with MeziMeida who operate Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com made their financial and fiscal data available.  Market watch reported:

In the fourth quarter of 2009, revenue in the Media, Affiliate Marketing and Technology segments exceeded the Company’s expectations, and all four business segments exceeded the Company’s expectations for operating income.
The breakdown, rounded up to the nearest thousand and based on affiliate marketing specifically is listed below:

Year 2009
•    Revenue total – $111,903,000
•    Cost of revenue – $15,617,000
•    Gross profit – $96,286,000
•    Operating expenses – $38,165,000
•    Segment income – $58,121,000

Year 2008 (for contrast and comparison)
•    Revenue total – $121,972,000
•    Cost of revenue – $19,374,000
•    Gross profit – $102,598,000
•    Operating expenses – $43,143,000
•    Segment income – $59,455,000

Not very impressive right?

They are only down 5 million on the year before and this can be attributed to the economy and the state it is currently in today.

Spokesman Malcolm Pinkerton said “As the cost of broadband falls, consumers become accustomed to internet shopping and retailers continue to enhance their online propositions, the channel will find itself extremely well placed to capitalize on the falling consumer confidence and lower levels of disposable income currently impacting the retail market”.

In light of these statistics and predictions it is clear that affiliate marketing should form part of an integrated and successful digital marketing strategy.

There are many affiliate marketing websites through which you can choose the products you would like to promote through your website. Commission Junction, Click Bank, E-junkie and Linkshare are some of the well-known affiliate marketing websites. Quite literally, thousands of publishers join affiliate marketing daily and while merchants join at a slower rate, it is increasing in velocity ensuring a much wider range of products or items are available.

Beginning to work as an affiliate or indeed using the networks mentioned earlier to have other people sell your products is a pretty simple process and in many cases the processes and opportunities are severely under estimated and under utilised, hence the reason for this article.  When I explain what affiliate marketing means and consists of and the benefits associated with this type of selling most businesses cant wait to get involved.

That’s when I need to explain the bad side.  Its not a major issue and it is handled well by the affiliate networks but its one that many have to consider before offering their products to other affiliates and its all about brand protection and reputation management. When other people sell your products you have little or no immediate control over how they approach the matter. While the likes of spamming are not permitted under the membership agreements of the affiliate networks, it wont stop people trying to take advantage and hope they don’t get caught.  If caught of course they and their details can be permanently banned from the network.

So, the question remains, what have your affiliates sold today?

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2008

American Mom Media

American Mom’s have taken up the social media mantle and are using it to track their children when at college or university to ensure that they make every effort to succeed and stay away from potential problems.  Some American Media Mom’s have even went further and integrated themselves into their children’s lives with alter egos to ensure they have a more direct influence on their development when out of physical reach.

Watch this concerning development and the story behind it right here:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Now seriously… I hope your laughing.  I sure as hell am.

What caught my attention (of course this would) was the theory presented by Andrew Keen entitled “User generated media is killing our culture and economy” and it addressed the subject of how social media, online video and music downloads are having an adverse effect on our culture and economy as it has created a massive shift in the means and methods by which we communicate and interact.

Rather than going into detail discussing the points in the theory you would of course be better off  watching the video, but some idiot has decided to restrict its viewing to the UK alone on the only youtube video I could find (something about copyright infringement, broadcasting rights or other such nonsensical statement) , which means that you will need to use a UK proxy to watch the discussion.

Anyway, ignoring this glitch, I will raise one thing that made the discussion for me. Reginald D. Hunter initially disqualified the theory but then decided to flip and approve it when he said something to the effect of “Yes, I think it is killing our culture and economy but I think these need to evolve, and maybe this is how it can happen”.  (Sorry I can’t quote this accurately at the moment, but this was the general idea).

Anyway, if you can see it enjoy, and if you come across a version that isn’t for the UK only please let me know (I will seek it out in the meantime anyway!)

Basically it adds in a panel to the side of the browser and allows you to do some pretty cool features regarding commenting on a post, article or even a specific piece of text or information.

All of the comments are aligned with your gmail account so its all “networked” back to your google profile, so thats a nice feature as well, but Im beginning to wonder if the good will be out weighed by the bad at some point.

Heres what has occured to me as being somewhat negative and is worrying me a little, though it is early days:

1. The sideWiki allows comments to be made on any page in the site on any piece of information but it DOES not notify the site owner that a comment has been made, so it will prove to be impossible to reply to sidewiki comments on larger sites.

2. Community is diluted in the site itself as the option to comment directly on the post has basically been liquidated.  I can effectively comment on any page anywhere.

3. I cannot moderate the comments, so spam is already a worry, but also, the opportunites for untrue or even slanderous comments is wide open and must be a serious worry for businesses. (I dont worry about arguements, love them actually but its difficult to enjoy one if I dont know it exists –> see point 1).

4. SEO wise, I really cant see what effect this will or would have on a site directly and how open the whole thing is to manipulation.  Will play a little more on the weekend with it and see what conclusions I can draw.

Anyone else got anything to add?

(I wonder how many of you smart alec’s will add your comments to the sidewiki instead of the comments on this post…  :P)

Yahoo have just released a new piece of software today, called SideLine,  that bears a striking resembelance to TweetDeck.  The offical site description reads like this:

Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license. The first beta release is out and the code is hosted on github. If you experience difficulties with the Flash “Install” badge on this site you can find the manual download here.

Without further delay I’m going to download it and give it a spin, will let you know what I think of it soon.

Visual Came across this interesting software on Touchgraph which has been integrated by Google via the API and serves to produce a visual representation of a specific keyword or URL (web address).

To quote Touchpad itself:

TouchGraph’s powerful visualization solutions reveal relationships between people, organizations, and ideas.

Explore the wealth of information in today’s growing data collections with our intuitive visual interfaces.

It is truly stunning to see the way the various sites are all interlinked and cross referenced visually, something that has not been done before and it can serve you will in understand at a glance just what you are connected to, in what way and how relevant it may be.

Check the Touchpad Google Browser site and follow the simple instructions. Enjoy the result!

Twitter has been around for a while now and as usual has gone done a storm in the USA. Its taking Europe a while to catch up but I think Twitter will become “the next big thing” over here.

So what is it?

Basically its a little like MSN Messenger in bite sized chunks combined with Facebook. Sounds strange right? Not really. Its a little difficult to get used to at the start in regards the hows and the whys but give it a chance and soon you will be complete a complete twit… no pun intended.

When you sign up for a free account with twitter you are able to search for friends already using the service, much like Facebook. You can then “follow” that friend meaning that as they twit (the term used to describe these bite sized chunks of information) you will see them immediately in your display window. The more fiends you are following the more twits you will receive.

Gradually you will also build up a following as more people become interested in you and your twits and the social network you develop can expand and expand.

Twitter

The initial stages of twitter will mean visiting www.twitter.com to review all your twits but there are other methods. Twitter is supported by a variety of plugins and desktop software making it much more convenient for you to stay in touch with your network.

TwitBin

The first example is Twitbin. This plugin can be installed into the Firefox browser and at the click of a button will open a side panel showing your twits and allowing you to add your own. Handy for when your surfing the web and want to pas interesting information out from a web page you have just visited.

Twhirl

Another option is Twhirl. This application downloads to your desktop and presents a floating console, much like MSN Messenger. There are numerous options you can set for the style of the console and how you receive your twits but its all simple enough to see and understand.

Twitter Tools

For the bloggers among you there is of course a wordpress plugin called twitter tools allowing you to add a widget on your blog sidebar displaying your latest twits and or the responses you receive.

Finally you can also use twitter on the move with (m)twitter. Any phone with an internet connection can twit while connected ensuring your never out of touch.

So what then? What use is this to me? Isnt it simply another distraction? Yes and No. Of course its addictive, but it has its use. Because of the character limit on the twits, you can never see or even have long winded conversations, that’s basically the point. Its small, tasty morsels that you can take or leave as you see fit and also its a source of content (for the blog) keeping it interesting and fresh.

Still not convinced… well Barak Obama is. He used twitter extensively throughout his campaign to communicate with as many people as possible, hence the reason he has 165,414 followers and is also following 168,769 people. A direct line to the President of the USa cant be a bad thing can it?

His twitter account is: http://twitter.com/BarackObama if you fancy checking it out.