This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about Black Friday and what’s hot for affiliates.

The show also includes talk of a new affiliate marketing conference, ASUS eee as a Christmas gift, Instant Form Pro from Joel Comm, a new affiliate control panel from AWeber, and the Affiliate Summit Twitter Contest.

Show Links

• Network Solutions and Black Friday
• Holiday Shipping Deadlines for Affiliates
• Will Affiliates Survive this Economy?
• New Survey Tool for Affiliate Marketers
• New Affiliate Control Panel at AWeber
• Twitter Contest: Chance to Win a Free Pass to Affiliate Summit

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

GeekCast 43 includes the full squad of Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson.  The show starts with a discussion of Shawn’s new BlackBerry Bold (on AT&T).

However, the cast moves into a discussion of Valley economics vs affiliate marketer economics, spurred on by a remembrance of Jason Calacanis’ keynote at Affiliate Summit West last year.  Companies and personalities such as FatWallet, Scott Jangro, Zac Johnson are compared to Mahalo, Twitter and Revision3. It’s a great segment, and probably one of the best in GeekCast history.

Sam then whines on about Twitter for too long.

There’s also a lengthy but good discussion on branding mostly between Jim and Lisa hammering out if branding even matters any more.  At the end, it is agreed that Lisa will now start wearing bacon pins everywhere.

Shawn recaps the happy mood at this week’s Ad:Tech in NYC and then the team scatters off into a million little discussions about all varieties of geekiness before settling on netbooks (with some promises of coming affiliate sites designed around them).

The show runs a golden-tie filled 71 minutes.

Show Notes:

- Shawn Got a Blackberry Bold
- AT&T’s Marketing Woes

- Calacanis Redux: Affiliates v Silicon Valley
- Of Runways and Layoffs
- Ad:Tech’s Mood
- Examples of Good Businesses (FatWallet, Zac Johnson, Scott Jangro)

- Twitter Woes and Feature Complaints
- Revenue’s Marketing

- Ask500People.com
- More AdTech Talk

- Branding: affiliate.com, Izea and Coke
- Netbooks

Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson once again take on a plethora of geek marketing related topics in this week’s episode of the always long but always strong GeekCast.

Here is just a smattering of the many topics that are discussed:
- Asus eee vs Dell’s new mini laptop
- Jim and Sam go at each other over cloud computing’s future
- More iPhone 3G vs Blackberry talk. It sounds as if Lisa is thinking of joining the Scoble train and getting an iPhone while Shawn remains resolute in his BlackBerry snobbery. And Jim just can’t find an iPhone in Ohio.
- AffiliateVoice is launching to augment or compete (there’s some debate) with the still forming Performance Marketing Alliance. Shawn and Sam then have a back-and-forth on language and whether or not “performance marketing” as a term is too ambiguous.
- Jim turns his mandals into a marketing scheme along with his ukulele playing.
- More talk about the upcoming Affiliate Summit in Boston on August 10-12. Somehow, the gang decides it is a good idea to do a live show a la Diggnation with beverages and a couch. We’ll see if that happens.

All in all, episode 26 is one for the ages. Literally. The show runs a ukelele rendition of a Neil Simon song 98 minutes.

The June 18, 2008 episode of Affiliate Thing covered the controversy surrounding the new Performance Marketing Alliance, and how they could potentially bring people together.

Lisa Picarille and I also gave a preview of the LinkShare Symposium, where the keynote speakers include Patti Freeman Evans, Research Director at JupiterResearch, who just put out “US Online Affiliate Marketing Forecast,2007 to 2012″.

Also, Peter Green, Marketing Director of Geeks.com, joined in to talk about the decision to remove New York affiliates as a result of the affiliate tax.

The show wrapped with my shocking announcement that I got an ASUS Eee sub-notebook computer, after I have been criticizing it for months.

But it’s now bigger and comes with XP as an option for the OS, where it was previously only available with Linux.

Show Links

• ASUS Eee PC
• U.S. Online Affiliate Marketing Forecast, 2007 to 2012
• Performance Marketing Alliance
• PMA Discussion on ABestWeb
• LinkShare Symposium

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Featuring Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson.