Microsoft Vista gadgets are a new thing.  Imagine a sidebar that is about 2 inches wide on the right side of the desktop screen of all Microsoft Vista users.  These users can pick and choose what gadgets they want in there.  Like a clock, calculator.  Gadgets can use live feeds so you can have a gadget that shows the daily news headlines or stock prices.  Gadgets can also be automatically updated.  So if you release a gadget then you come out with version 2.0 of your gadget you can update your pre-exisiting users.

Microsoft expects 200 million Vists users within 2 years.  If you get 1% of those users to be interested in your gadget and download it you are talking about having real estate on 2 million computer desktops.  Now do you understand why everyone is interested in this?

Currently there are few gadgets out there.  It is easy to stake a claim and become the incumbent force.  Don’t wait too long since sites like http://www.gadgetspark.com are building gadgets for anybody with $600.  If you have a business and dont know how gadgets can help you, I am going to offer my brainstorming ability.  Just post your details in the comments and I’ll respond with what I would do.

Last week on my Internet marketing radio show GoodKarma I was discussing affiliate managers and the concept of skimming (the act of not paying affiliates for all valid sales). It seems I might not have been clear and some people might have misunderstood what I meant. My position is that every affiliate manager should know what skimming is NOT that every affiliate manager is skimming. There are many good affiliate managers that DO NOT skim, are very HONEST and are nice enough people I would take them home to meet my mom.
Affiliate managers have a hard job. They need to make sure the affiliates are promoting the program and not damaging the brand reputation. They also need to make sure their technical team is properly tracking sales and paying affiliates on time. Not to mention the many other things a good affiliate manager needs to do.

If an affiliate manager does not know what “skimming” is they can not keep an eye open to make sure it is not occurring. When an affiliate contacts them and wonders why their conversion rate has dropped with no obvious reason, the affiliate manager better know what “skimming” is and be able to truthfully say that is not the cause. I am lucky and have found several really good affiliate managers who do a great job running their programs and proactively finding sales that accidentally fall through the cracks and paying me for them. I have also found the occasional “rotten apple”.

The most humorous incident of dealing with a bad affiliate manager was when my conversion rate kept falling for 3 months until it was almost exactly 1%. When I confronted the affiliate manager, the person claimed to not even know what the concept of skimming was and said it was impossible for me not be receiving credit for all my sales. The next month my conversion rate rose to almost exactly 2%. And he still claimed he was not manipulating my affiliate account. Needless to say I stopped sending him my traffic and spent more time working on projects for the good affiliate managers that I know.

It appears that Google is testing the concept of adding a Google Base search box in their serps.  Below is a screen capture of what Google is showing for the keyword “homes for sale”.  Since they are already showing three paid listings on top of the organic search results it is interesting they would take away even more page real estate to add a search box for real estate listings in Google Base.  If they keep this up it will not matter if you rank #1 since no organic search results will be above the fold.  Google Base is still free so it wouldn’t be adding revenue.  The tests I did returned pages that are already in their standard search index.  I don’t really see a good reason for this, unless Google is laying down the groundwork for more specialized searching (after all you can only expect so much relevance when you have a single user input box) Good luck Google with your beta test.  Questions, comments?  Speak up.

[tags]google base, google beta, google serps[/tags]

A warm GoodKarma welcome to Vanessa Fox of Google Engineering.  Listen to her Google Sitemap interview at WebmasterRadio.fm