Andy’s Blog

I’ve put off writing anything about this upcoming event, not because of any negative reason, I think the event will be a fantastic event and as many affiliates as possible should attend.

 

The sad thing (for me) is there a high likelihood that I won’t be able to attend. This year has been rather slow and sadly the finances won’t stretch that far.  2 passes, 2 sets of return tickets to London plus tube travel is just not going to happen boo-hoo .

 

The 2 day event itself will be a mix of networking, Q&A sessions, exhibitions, seminars and more networking.

 

The list of exhibitors is a bit of a who’s who of internet retail including many merchants, Affiliate networks and agencies and hopefully a few freebies could be collected .

 

Noteable speakers include:

 

Joost De Valk

Kieron Donoghue

Naomi Brown

 

 Like last year there will be a “Meet the Super Affiliates” panel which was incredibly popular last year and no doubt will be just as popular this year.

 

On top of all this there is Thames Cruise, pre-event network party, after event party, food and loads of the nicest people you could wish to meet, what more could you want?

 

For a full details of the event and to book your place theres a nice banner here.

 

 

Former workers at the web giant Google have launched a rival search engine. 

 

Cuil (pronounced Cool), and old irish word for knowledge, claims to have a larger index than google with 121,617,892,992 pages indexed.

They also say that they differ from google and similar engines because instead of relying purely upon popularity metrics, they search for and rank content based on relevance, they then analyze the entire content on the site concepts and inter-relationships to generate its listings.

The results are then listed Magazine Style rather than in list format, which takes a little getting used to but seems to work well.

It might be interesting to see how they do, but I, no doubt like many others, am not sure how much of an impact they can have on google or any of the other search engines. They’ve certainly got a huge hill to climb before google starts to panic.

I have had a look for some of my main keyphrases and if they do become huge should  be fairly well placed, unless they alter something that is.

 

The homepage is even more minimalist than google and the results are very slow to appear at the moment(new servers may be in need).

from the Cuil website

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

Full press release here

After setting up a myspace account and then a bebo account and various other Social Networking accounts It took my a while to be bothered to set-up a facebook account.

Filling in profiles and then adding contacts, and then getting all the crappy updates about shoes people have been buying etc. just seemed to take up to much of my day.

I finally set-up an account earlier this year and am very gald that I did, I’ve found loads of old friends some new and keep in contact with business associates aswell, but the best thing about facebook is the ‘Developer App’ adding this to my profile has enabled me to create a simple application for facebook which now has a dozen users at my last check.

I spent just an hour creating the program and then linking into the facebook app and of course its a money making excercise for me, but also for those people who have added the application, it saves them time(they’re always on facebook anyway) as it gives them the latest information about the products and with some very good offers I’ve managed to rustle up from merchants they should save some money too.

So give it a go there is a very good communty on facebook willing to help and you could have a simple application along with your affiliate links put together in no time at all.

Now I just need another couple of thousand users and I’m really onto a winner.