Here’s my recommendation for one blog, if you want to read great liveblogging – Lisa Barone’s over at the Outspoken Media blog, covering the ASE sessions she’s attending.

You can catch her sessions here: Lisa Barone ASE09 liveblogging. (she tags her posts correctly, so you can bookmark that page for up-to-date coverate).

What makes a great live blogging session is a combination of factual reporting of the speaker/speakers presentation, plus the blogger’s subjective/objective interpretation of whether their words makes sense. A healthy sense of humor and snark doesn’t hurt either.

The SEO folks seem to live blog their seminars most closely, and affiliate summit coverage hasn’t seemed as heavily covered, despite the number of “Press” attendees walking about.

Some other coverage of ASE09:

• Affiliate Summit Co-founder Shawn Collins’ write up at AffiliateTip (from past experience, he’ll likely do end-of-day recaps)
• Possibly regular coverage at WebMetricsGuru
• Possibly regular coverage from Tim Jones

Also coverage from:

• TrishaLyn (initially I’d thought she was live blogging the panel she was on…which would be interesting. Then I saw that a guest blogging was doing the blogging)
• Ayako Bingham on her Branding100 blog
• John Chow’s Meet Market video coverage (with an “attractive girl” that the blog commentars seem to want to get to know better)

For Affiliate Summit East updates, I’d suggest looking at Justin Barr’s AffBuzz.com affiliate blog aggregator for updates.

Looking at the hashtag #ASE09 on twitter might be counterproductive as the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low (especially late at night when drunk affiliates send stream-of-consciousness tweets).

If you’re looking for blog posts, using Google’s Blog Search with the “Affiliate Summit East” search string might ultimately be the most productive (unless the blogs aren’t indexed in google…)

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Shawn has also just posted that Affiliate Summit West 2010 will be held in Las Vegas, Jan 17-19 featuring keynote speakers Dr. Robert Cialdini (author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”) and “Copyblogger” Brian Clark.

Brian Clark has also stepped in with the legal perspective on what’s kosher and what’s not, when it comes to “word of mouth marketing” AKA social media.

So taking a look at social media for a moment, the medium is very personality-based – we follow individuals (or maybe Britney Spears’ manager firing out tweets on her behalf), and hence there’s greater inferred trust in the communication. This means that when someone is promoting/recommending something, you’re more likely to trust/believe them.

By embedding third party links for products or services you might not be familiar with, and are receving a kickback/commission/payout from, you’re essentially selling your goodwill, for a couple of bucks at best.

Even if you don’t buy the whole “polluting the internet” social argument by participating in this process, you should take a look at it from business and profit perspective.

If you’re buring your credibility promoting potentially second-rate products, you’ll be associated with these class of products. Soon, your followers will realize, you’re at best a promoter of iffy, if not inferior products…and they’ll take their business elsewhere.

In that light, isn’t it better to choose to promote only products you personally use or believe in?

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When it comes to disclosure, I likewise think it’s pretty silly to label your links with (aff) or [AFF]. What’s the point?

I’ve not stepped into a store and seen price tags labelled with a “We may earn a profit from your purchase” disclaimer on it.

When it comes to the net, it’s safe to assume that someone is earning something off your purchase. Even if it’s a donation to a charity via it’s website, the payment processor is still earning a couple of cents processing the transaction.

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Now that we have that out of the way, can we work towards something that makes sense and doesn’t involve ugly, huge disclaimers plastered all over affiliate-run sites?

Obviously, an auction site (or “digital marketplace” if you prefer that term, publishing blog posts about content publishers generating affiliate income is going to draw some interest.

eBay, from my experience, has taken a fairly non-supporting position towards affiliate marketers on it’s network, so seeing them point to Brian “Copyblogger” Clark’s posts is refreshing.

Except, instead of pointing at Brian’s post “Why Affiliate Marketing Will Save Free Online Content“, the eBay blog post points at his feedburner feed, the pretty obscure “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/274785900/”

Which is one step forward by giving support for free online content, supported by affiliate marketing, but on the other hand, slaps this free online drive, by denying link juice so Brian’s blogpost will rank higher in the search engine results.

On the other hand, it could be an intern or uninformed blogger over at eBay who pulled the link off Brian’s RSS feed and simply published it on the blog. But really, if it was an oversight, shouldn’t a company which generated net income of $460 million on revenue of $2.2 billion for the 2nd quarter ended June 30, 2008, know better?

Some bloggers won’t care about search engine positions, while others (myself included) will use linkbuilding as part of our traffic generation strategy.

While it’s nice to get some referred traffic through the citation in a blog post, since bloggers are providing high quality content worth linking to, shouldn’t the aggregator give a direct, followed link to their source too?

In the journalism world, we’ve a standing practise to cite source and give credit and attribution when using an expert source. Although recent talks with Michael Gray AKA GrayWolf, seems to indicate that it’s a whole new ballgame when you’ll look at the online world.

What do you think?

Oh and they help negotiate with ISPs to ensure your email is delivered, and rotate IPs on their email servers, so it doesn’t get tagged as a “bad” IP.

Actually there’s much more than that, and Aweber’s education marketing manager Justin Premick gave an insiders view of the inner workings of Aweber.

More importantly, we discussed:

• The relationship marketing principles involved in maintaining a successful email marketing list
• Companies which are already successfully using email in their marketing efforts
• Resources to help you bring your email campaigns to the next level
• Tips for affiliate marketers incorporating email into their existing PPC and SEO campaigns
• And we also unearthed a tip which could help you massively increase your results from promoting CPA affiliate offers…

It all happens here at the Friday Podcast.

Check out the audio interview below:

References:

Aweber autoresponder service

Brian Clark CopyBlogger blog

Spam Resource

Google Sender Reputation white paper