The spam emails began rolling in yesterday afternoon and continued into this morning. I suspect the spam will only grow over the next few weeks making my gmail account completely unusable as an information conduit. It turns out there’s a small box that is checked by default just off the bottom of the mobile web WiFi sign up page that says “yes please spam me with bull shit offers for the rest of my life”. I never saw the checked box, and I foolishly entered my true email address. Thank you Simons Mall for killing my gmail account.

For comparison I should share that my email address is on public web pages in several locations, and yet I’ve never received anything resembling the deluge of junk email as I have over the past 24 hours. Black hat advertising is malicious, irrelevant, and disgusting.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t ever, EVER enter your email address into any web form unless you absolutely trust the company not to sell off your information for a few cents.

update
The spam mails have subsided, perhaps Google has identified the bulk of them and kindly forwarded them to /dev/null on my behalf.

Passed by a train billboard ad on the way home from Manhattan yesterday and the above image is what I saw.

Ideal walking weather yesterday, here’s a taste of Central Park:

(the rest of the images)

Boundaries

Constraints whether artificially applied or born from forces outside of our influence, inspire us to discover creative abilities that would otherwise have lain dormant. The barrier serves as a question which challenges us to critically examine automatic assumptions and foregone conclusions. Existence is much more than rules based decision making and pattern matching, it is an endless supply of novelty. Within that novelty lay the keys to creative inspiration and freedom.

A restriction reduces the systematic degrees of freedom and acts like a shade which blocks out the sun of infinite possibilities. To utilize a constraint, we must know it. Only when we recognize a constraint for what it is, may we explore the hidden opportunities its presence reveals.

What if…

we created a digital global network which mimics features of the current internet but with a single additional law, “though shalt not advertise”? This single constraint lead to a series of questions:

1. How would that rule be enforced?
2. Do communities like this already exist?
3. How would services monetize without the ability to charge a fraction of visitor attention with interruptions and noise?

How would the balance of adless and adworld look and feel?

Enforcement

There’s no reason a new interruption-less network couldn’t coexist with all the connections we have now, but imposing this kind of restraint on an existing community is unnecessary. A simple implementation would be an opt in tag that can be used for identity and as a statement that anything under a domain or subdomain is ad free.

Without overestimating there are likely hundreds of millions or billions of adless pages out in the wild already.

I’ve dabbled with ads in the past on this blog, hosting one developed by our startup, and sharing an image and link to friends services. Yet I was never able to create an ad that didn’t feel like a tax on visitor attention.

One of the implementations of going ad free I cooked up this morning is a single button which takes a user to a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde alternate web impression of a page. Beyond a single page or domain, an alternate switch could act globally as a browser feature or plugin. The transition would be clear but in practice the adworld could take on a range of styles from a Vegas like experience to a more subtle and elegant promotional experience.

Background for this post:

• Chris Dixon: Why content sites are getting ripped off
• Fred Wilson: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Link
• Jonathan Mendez: The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising

Chris, Fred and Jonathan have spent some cycles digging into what I see now as a great opportunity for market disruption. Advertising as we know it is about to go through a pretty heavy shift. But it’s not only advertising which is about to flip, it’s also manufacturing, online stores, warehouses, drop shippers, customer service, and sales.

Here’s the revolution I see brewing in the relation between the Net, manufacturing, storing/delivery, and sales:

I can smell the opportunity. We need to shift the system so that the problem is reframed.

1) As a content creator and affiliate you would like to be compensated for downstream purchase actions directly or indirectly related to your link and commentary

2) Those downstream (as Liad stated below) have no financial incentive to change the status quo

3) To improve the analysis of downstream actions, whether they happen a day later or a few months later, real time data needs to be collected from sites/services which opt in to a Universal Tracker (protocol/standard).

4) Simple statistical models that correlate user purchase actions with multiple relevant product referrals can fairly distribute affiliate revenue.

5) Fully decoupled manufacturing processes from single brand drop shipping (Amazon and other big online brands, are ripe for disruption), will allow the market to fairly assess the value of an affiliate sale.

6) Quantization of sales influence, versus the various steps of design, manufacture, product warehousing, drop shipping, or other segments of product to consumer flow will be optimally rewarded to benefit not only the consumer, but all parties involved.

The preceding comments from AVC (my favorite blog hangout for a good reason).

I see tracking as a HUGE part of the solution to this problem:

It’s great seeing an important systemic error getting attention. Let’s invent some brilliant tracking solutions to renew the affiliate concept and maybe make a few bucks along the way.

What we need are smarter links. First off users should see something like a shortened URL. We can do all sorts of fancy link tracking with shortened urls. We need a way of identifying user action with high confidence that was at least partially the result of earlier content sharing.

When three of my super human filters or friends all praise a service or product who should get the affiliate cut? Right now only the last one does, unless I choose to go directly to the source or puchase from another friends affiliate link.

On average the link value has the greatest value when it leads me to relevant and quality information, maybe even free of charge. How about a regular donation (user decided each month) that let’s us show appreciation for quality links and sharing.

It’s clear that affiliate link value is under rewarded, driving us to search and invent more motivating models. Victus Media’s personal ads are initially designed around affiliate revenue (via Amazon), but we’re more than happy to consider more effective alternatives.

Users could even tip us with a mini-payment if they appreciated a quality shared link, or go as far as signing up for a monthly or various per click fees to advertise their links through are matching system.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Monetize the audience, not the content (vator.tv)
• How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote (problogger.net)
• I’m a customer. Envelop me, dont tack me on. (jeremymeyers.com)
• VigLink Raises $800K To Take Hassle Out Of Affiliate Programs (techcrunch.com)
• Build a WordPress Amazon Associates Store with AffiliateBang (wpjedi.com)

Amazon product links have an interesting optional functionality called Product Preview. It has had other arcane names in the past (link enhancer), but has a similar functionality to Snapshots. Basically when you mouse over an enhanced link, the browser renders a small image with detailed information.

The function has a few nifty features:

• It shows the Amazon logo/frame that triggers more consumer trust than a random link
• It gives latest pricing information
• it shows a product image
• it conserves page real estate

Getting it to work

So after some html and scripting views of an old website (my first) both Tyler and I dug up the official documentation at the Amazon Affiliate lair. With some tweaking of the URL and the appended image we were in business on our end. Then we added the Amazon JavaScript and whala:

• It worked in Firefox
• An empty Amazon box popped up on Chrome
• It worked in Internet Exploder

It worked in IE but not Chrome, (*engineering expletives deleted?!?*).
Why had my beloved speed demon of a browser forsaken me? It turns out there’s a known issue with Product Preview with WebKit browsers. Problogger Darren Rowse (sharp fellow that I bumped into on Twitter a while back) discovered this almost three years ago. As you can witness, this has been a HOT BUTTON topic for the folks at Safari and Chrome land. It’s a rendering problem they don’t care to fix or that Amazon doesn’t see value in working around.

My gut instinct is to punt and show the boxes in the widget all the time, and to revisit alternate designs that work cross browser and cross ad platform (Google, Microsoft, our own). Generic views my ass .

Why we looked at the design

The Intelligent Media Manager has a widget ad box that is in a continual state of improvement. In addition to planned and implemented semantic functional upgrades the base ad display was in need of spiffing up.

Before we hire on a web designer pro to make the ad box a sexy irresistable force of nature, we want to gather more information and gradually grow our user base. I figured an evening of elbow polish would help after some feedback from designer friend Shana Carp (she wants to support our concept by hosting the box, but thinks it’s a bit of an eyesore). Ideally the ad widget will be fully customizable by the host to allow for smooth thematic integration.

Victus Media

Our tagline: We are about providing incredible user value by doing novel things with information.

Our mission: To create tools and services that provide improved two way search, and allow for people to serendipitously discover both information and other folks who share their interests. The monetary force that will drive this mission is based on contextual, personal advertisements created from social media.

The company homepage is at Victus Media and the latest suite of tools and services is coming out of Victus1.victusmedia.com our Rackspace hosted cloud solution. At this early stage we are looking for user and site host feedback.

*Edit sorry the video was a private test for Tyler, will be publicly viewable or he’ll create a public one*

Here’s a quick intro video, thanks to the Chief Tech Tyler Gillies (it’s easier to read full screened):

We will continue working on enhancing the search aspects of the tool (current usage is limited by a split between keywords derived from twitter streams, and manually entering terms into a tool like frankensearch). In addition we’ll be using oauth to incorporate Facebook, and Google Wave (after it opens up) input streams.

Our long form semantic tool is Zemanta for RSS blog feeds, and the status form semantic tool is from Orchestr8 using the AlchemyAPI. These companies are uncovering value in an entirely new set of information tools.