The Social Contract of Affiliate Linking

Welcome to Webgenome - it is our goal to map the face of the web! I strongly recommend to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep updated with the latest progress. Thanks for visiting!

Recently I had good chat on Skype with one of my valued readers about the nature of posting Affiliate links.

In non-tech industries, the average reader won’t know the difference between an affiliate and non-affiliate link. They will click on the link, goto the site and purchase all the while having no idea that some guy is getting paid %%% just because they came through that link.

However in this industry almost all readers (expect the total noobs) will be aware %100 that any link to paid product/service from my site will eventually get me paid in one way or another.

Link redirect makes it look nice, but our readers are well aware that they can simply type the name of the good/service into google and go directly to the site in question and get the same value without me ever getting paid and the end-site just keeping the difference in unclaimed commissions. I know this because I sadly admit that I have done this exact same thing in the past when I signed up for a service and I just didn’t like the attitude of the person that wrote the article (i think it was some guy from Vancouver with the wrong attitude whose link I bypassed) Read more

Avoiding Responsibility

Why Companies Fail

To get straight to the point, lets say that there are two types of organanizations in the world,

Now let us examine in detail the two types of Companies

The Winner

This company will usually have a deep ingrained purpose and culture. They will have a high employee retention ratio and their founder/CEO will generally be loved/admired by the workforce. While the pay may or may not be good, their employees are satisfied by a sense of acomplishment and greater meaning.

The Loser

This companies employees are motivated by that paycheck they recieve at the end of the week. Their primary job responsiblity will include doing just enough work to avoid being blamed when something goes wrong. So when the shit hits the fan, they can say with total legality.

Then Michelle in Marketing says

Without getting into more examples I think you all know well the situation. Everybody did their part. Everybody fulfilled their job responsibilities as dictated, but in the end it is still a failure.

A winning organization has people who fully comprehend that their job responsiblity also includes the results and not just the assigned actions to attain these result.

Programmers

Lets talk about programmers because I deal with alot of them in my day to day business and know lots of people in various orginizations. Not to take sides, but I will share my experience with various cultures Read more

Jungle Boyz

I live in the jungle in Thailand and make my living on the internet

yes I do admit it. The closet shopping mall is a 4 hour drive down the mountain to Chaing Mai. But for some odd reason, I have DSL in my house and with internet I am a step away from the rest of the world.

I left the Bay Area permantly in 2001 on a one way ticket to India. At this point I was 2 years out of College and already fed up with the Bay Area rat race. I remember saying to myslef that even if I went and achieved all of my dreams and goals, I would still shurg and be unsatisfied.

So I left for the Jungle, and in the process creating an virtual operation using my network of dropout developers from across North America and Europe (Thai developers are good with Graphics, but cant be trusted with code) who all hide out in Thailand never wanting to go back to their country of orgin.

It is a life of midnight VOIP calls to California, stuffed envelopes passed at girly bars in exchange for code and a few Hong Kong incorporations. But I get to live in the jungle. My village has about 5,000 people and in the mornings I can drive my motorcycle ten minutes to a natural hot spring bath.

We put up websites for love and for profit.

All in all our operation is virtual. the only tangible things that we touch are the computer and the cash from the ATM.

So how did I do it? Read more

From BBS to Facebook

In the beginning was a modem and the modem was good. With this modem, many unrelated people could all call a single computer and this computer could serve their requests and allow them to exchange information. In the beginning was a BBS.

BBS soon evolved into popular services for the masses that went by the names of AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve.

The core concept of these entities was not that much different than a BBS, however they put a graphical skin on it to make easy for the general population to use. On these self contained services, users could chat with each other, share information and so forth.

Soon man became restless with being trapped within a pre-defined playground and began to look to the outer reaches of space.

Man thought that if a big company could make a little world of information for people to play in, then why couldn’t common man do this as well.

Here we have the beginnings of the World Wide Web.

  1. Pick a subject
  2. Get a Domain or host
  3. Write or host discussion on this subject and look you have thousands of people every day visiting your home made web page

From this point most of it is history and standard exponential growth. AOL and the Fishtanks died in the face of the great ocean, 1999 came and people began to realize that the web was going to eventually replace TV and Tradional Media as the prime source for peoples entertainment and information.

Here came gold rush 1.0 Read more