“Next generation affiliate marketing”, “one of the true pioneers of affiliate marketing…” “the culmination of eight years of development and includes the input and consultation of hundreds of affiliates and merchants.”

Or the same old same old, repackaged slightly? Time, as it always does in this game, will tell.

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I’d add to the list of grievances this one thing - Google’s creation of PageRank, the inevitable arrival of a market in this commodity, only for the originators to turn round and say this has to stop now, and here’s your penalty…

Although, it has to be said - live by the market, die by the market - perhaps some socialism is stirring in the heart of DIY US capitalism…

But that all changed, when paid blogging brokers started using Alexa in their scoring algorithm - the better the rank, the higher the payment.

It’s an imperfect index, we know that, they know that - but what else are they going to use? So the possibility of manipulating Alexa rank for monetary gain opened wide…

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Yes, if you have a well-established site, lots of backlinks, stable traffic, then the positioning will play a predictable part in the metrics of it - the stuff about eye movements makes perfectly good sense. But if you’re not a super-powered problogger what then? How many visitors take one look at the PPC, get the distinct impression they’ve arrived at a MFA niche site and close, never to return again?

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MyBlogLog - little more than a gimmick? A piece of javascript just too far?

One day, much along the lines of the WordPress download crack, someone is going to get to the relevant URI and create an interesting havoc on the few million sites that host the 3rd party code. It’s the downside of Web Services.

Yahoo bought the company and it subsided into a quiet black hole. Even with the data mining, where’s the real money here? And although this is not Yahoo’s question to answer, why is this service better administered by a web giant?

It’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion - a shiny Web2.0 acquisition made in some haste and repented at some leisure.

Currently this market is embryonic - similar to that for search engines around 1998, when early leaders, eg Altavista, Northern Lights, were eclipsed by one operation with a clearly better technical/business model. However, as it stands, the major brokers are:

Reviewme
Hand-in-glove with Text Link Ads - and probably the market leader. Had some problems with their scoring algorithm refusing to update and being open to manipulation - as are they all - but in general appears a competent operation, with potential for growth.

Payperpost
Took a lot of the flak over the ethical issue, has courted the good/bad publicity ever since and seems to be doing well enough for itself despite. Relatively low number of qualified posts for bloggers starting up.

Loudlaunch
As the name suggests, made a considerable noise but, ironically, problems with their startup. Lost a significant number of user accounts and could take up to six weeks to approve a blog. Seem to be getting their act together now.

SponsoredReviews
USP is was that bloggers bid the advertiser for the opportunity over price - advertiser may decline/accept. Bloggers seem to like this - except for the relatively large numbers of bids left hanging because the advertizer simply ignores and fails to decline - the blogger cannot plan ahead how much work may or may not need to be done.

Blogitive
A complex model, involving third-party, “ghost” blogging and a serious number of mail-order brides. May become big, probably won’t.

Other entrants: to early to judge, although Smorty shows promise, they look to have absorbed lessons from the other’s early mistakes.

What do you reckon? - if you’ve got any experience or feedback that contradicts all this completely, let us know…

“… the two companies - which first explored the idea a few years ago and then went their own ways - were looking at ways they could pair their strengths to create a greater competitor to Google…”

Well, the point being that what would be the point of msn? Microsoft have never been in love with the internet. If they could have got away with calling it DeskWeb, they would have..

Obviously the combination of PPC programmes would be interesting and tricky - but maybe it’s the blogs - Spaces and Yahoo360 - where the greatest effect in terms of change of competitor could lie - although how you’d go about challenging Blogger is the real and present nightmare. The company-knows-best, rather controlling attitude of MS, approach, ie login to free hotmail every 30 days or else, the tight controls on what code/scripts can appear on Spaces, would presumably extend.

However, by the end of the day, it appeared that the story was misguided, or at least out-of-date, unless you define “takeover” as “partnership.”

Yes, a non-story - with testing-the-water as a heading… You’d sort of think it has to be - one day - if not now…

Impressions are certainly spurious if generated by these means, but quite why, in the real world as opposed to the Googleverse, a click is more spurious than one generated by any other means is not made clear. Isn’t it unfortunate that so little is made clear.

But it’s always interesting to see a site with toolbar PR 1 and Alexa rank 14,000.

The single most important aspect of a link bait piece is its title. On social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Digg, the title is pretty much all people see before they decide to vote or bookmark. In a 1000-word article with a 10-word title, the 10 words in the title are probably more important than the next 1000.”

 Search is fracturing: Google now offers web search, image search, video search, news search, local search, “more” search and “even more” search. Do you optimize for one, a few or all types of search? How can you optimize if, as may already be happening, satisfying the demands of one algorithm causes another to punish you.

The death refers to the fact that in the main these are probably bad things for web1.0 SEO and its practioners - but possibly good for end-users of websites.