Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

• Ian Fernando
• Miles Baker

PR 5

• Zac Johnson
• Oilman
• Shawn Collins
• Joel Comm
• Wil Reynolds
• Andrew Wee (me)
• Todd Malicoat
• Reg Saddler AKA Zaibatsu

PR 6

• Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger
• Michael Gray AKA Graywolf
• Sam Harrelson
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jim Kukral

PR 7

• Chris Brogan
• Barack Obama

PR 8

• Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

It’s important to look at long-term strategies to get your business on a solid foundation. That is, if you don’t want to find yourself scrambling from one rock to another, as your “empire” sinks into the sand.

Let’s look at some ways to build up personal credibility, especially in the vastness of cyberspace, where a billion websites are calling out for attention.

Here are some essentials that every website should possess:

• Background and Biographical information

At the least, you need an “About” or “About Me”, “About Us” or “About Andrew” / “About (insert your name)”. And having text like “This is an example of a WordPress Page” doesn’t count either.

People want to read and possibly do business with people they know. And “knowing” goes beyond a run-of-the-mill “XYZ Inc is a leading Fortune 500, Inc Hot 100 Tech Startup”.

Pfft. These awards carry some weight, but if you take a second to think about some of the leading tech companies like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, the names Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs come to mind. Personalization if not just a “strategy”, it should be the cornerstone of your success if you want to succeed online.

Going beyond a mention of yourself the person, going a little deeper to include biographical information, adds color and builds stickiness, especially if your audience identifies with you. Whether you were a pump station attendant, McDonald’s French Fry Specialist or an Air Traffic Controller. The “personal cred” factor can be one of the key factors in determing your conversion rate, more so than having the BBB or TrustE logos on your site.

• Photographs/Images

Yes, we’ve seen blogs containing only text (especially if the content has been lifted from somewhere else and pasted verbatim on the site). These can succeed, although adding images and video gives a huge advantage to those who put in the effort to make their blog or website go the multimedia route.

Some good examples include SuperAffiliateMindset’s Amit Mehta:

Scott Jangro’s Jangro.com

Shawn Collin’s AffiliateTip

From a photo montage in his banner. (Left-to-right – Myself, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson)

A picture says a thousand words. If you have videos, I’d expect they’d say 100,000 words.

If you haven’t already gone the multimedia route, it could bring your business to the next level.

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If you have a takeaway from this, it’s not that adding “stuff” to your blog or website is going to bring some magic dust with it. However, given that the internet is constantly expanding, going the personal route or looking inward may seem contradictory. If you try it out however, you may just discover that it pays big dividends.

Aside from his experience at Kowabunga, and as one of the co-founders of ReveNews (with Wayne Porter) and having launched BlogKits, Scratchback and the now (infamous?) TwitterMeThis, Jim has just launched the Online Video Toolkit this week – a series of video tutorials on setting up to create video content.

Besides talking about the launch of OVT, we also discussed a number of video marketing strategies and its future prospect for online marketers.

Check out this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast

Online Video Toolkit

I am probably behind the curve when it comes to picking up new-fangled technology, unlike Shawn Collins, Scott Jangro and Sam Harrelson.

On a recommendation from Kerri Morrison (AKA @kmore) , I checked out Twitterific.

Oh great…it’s Mac-only. I typically keep my MacBook on a pile of Cat5 ethernet cables under my desk most of the time and I don’t think I’ll be firing it up, so I can burn more time on twittering…

Twhirl looks like a better alternative – it’s Windows and Mac OS X and I see a number of people sending updates using it.

I’ll probably check this out.

Anyone have experience? What do you recommend?

I don’ think I’ll venture into Pownce territory till next week, as there’s quite a bit of site development on a couple of new verticals I’m working on.

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West, or even if you attended, you probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to attend every session as there were 4 simultaneous sessions with many great sessions in the same time slot. I enjoyed listening to the “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” by Wil Reynolds, the video innovation panel chaired by Buy.TV’s Melissa Salas, the social media panel chaired by Sam, the super affiliate panel with Kris Jones, Zac Johnson, Amit Mehta and John Chow, the ABestWeb panel….I haven’t had a chance to listen to all the sessions yet, but there’s quite a hoard of great content there.

You might also like to check out the editorial panel I appeared on.

#3: Affiliate Fortune Cookies: A 5-day a week podcast from Sam, it’s his take on Lost, science fiction, social media, affiliate marketing and whatever else comes to mind. As Sam mentions, it’s intended to be a personal podcast and you can kind of hear his existential angst, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing/internet marketing in recent episodes.

Those are my top 3 podcasts at the moment, given the limited time I spend sitting and listening to podcasts.

You might also like to check out Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing podcast on Webmaster Radio, Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider also on WMR. They’re other podcasts on the Geekcast network.

Another resource I highly recommend are the past episodes of Affiliate Marketing Today, especially the episodes hosted by AbestWeb owner Haiko De Poel and the later season hosted by Jeremy Palmer. These sessions provide a great foundation in affiliate marketing for new marketers.

I keep hearing that GarageBand is a great software suite for podcasting on the Mac, and I might fire up my new MacBook to test it out soon.

Also on the cards is a live podcast via Skype’s SkypeCast service one of these days when I have a little more time on my hands.

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLynâ€s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But Iâ€m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Iâ€m halfway around the world, reading and blogging about this at 4am, youâ€ll see that social media is pervasive and goes viral instantly. Forget “tell-a-friend” the news is delivered as soon as you type “twitter” or “youtube” into your address bar.

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What are the implications for social marketers?

• Awareness: Given the fact that most marketers will be reading words on their screen or facing a videocam, itâ€s easy to forget that thereâ€s another person at the other end of the computer. You can make friendships really easily on the internet, you can similarly disagree, argue and experience flare-ups with your friends too.
• The meaning is not always clear: Obviously nothing will communicate your point as well as a face-to-face meeting. Itâ€s hard to tell if someone is being serious or theyâ€re just joking around when they say they are upset with you. You could think theyâ€re joking around, when in fact they could be seriously upset at the other end.
• Itâ€s still the “undiscovered country”: Yes, we know how to use these new fangled technologies, but I donâ€t think we fully understand the social implications and more importantly the social consequences of social media yet. Sociologists have been study cultures for the last 100 years since the “father of sociology” Auguste Compte founded the field. Now what happens when you happens when you add the ability to instantaneously alert thousands, if not hundred of thousands of people with a single video, blog post or twit?

I think anyone whoâ€s read the documentation, FAQs and tutorial videos will be able to use the social media out there pretty easily.

But to be able to use such channels effectively and at the same time, responsibly, is another matter.

As Marvel Comics founder and creator of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Stan Lee coined the phrase, “With great power there must also come – – great responsibility!“

In the midst of shuffling paper around for hours and hours in my office (a real joy), I’ve been listening to episodes of Geekcast.

What I like about Geekcast’s easygoing, conversational banter between Shawn Collins, Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson is that it’s pretty stream-of-consciousness and more shoot-from-the-hip compared to a more produced program like Lisa and Shawn’s Affiliate Thing or Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider.

It’s like talk radio for the internet marketer, and goes beyond the affiliate marketing/affiliate management/blogging/social media borders to cover all things “geeky”.

In the latest episode Web 2.0 is the Devil, (yes, it’s still a dirty word) – it’s interesting to hear about the dirty word beyond it’s traffic and monetization implications to get into the guts of the zeitgeist or spirit of social media.

As Lisa mentions, how do you separate your twitter stream and create a divide between the public and personal messages – how do you create twits that your boss or employees or clients can’t access?

It kinda reminds me of the early days of email, before email folders where everything sat in one massive “inbox”.

Right now, social media is still at it’s rudimentary “1.0” stage, where everything is dumped into one huge social channel.

You can follow Scott Jangro’s post and pull up extra commands to try to manage your twitter stream.

Or follow his advice to un-follow people and just follow the ones you like.

On another note, Facebook has create a provision for “limited profiles” where you can selectively adjust your Facebook profile so your cell phone, email address, mailing address don’t show to people whom you’ve just met.

But back to twitter…

How do you filter your updates (AKA “content”).

Do you create a “Fake Steve Jobs” or “Private Lisa” persona and have friends subscribe to that?

But it would show up on their list of “Following” users – unless the people you are following could be set to “invisible” or “private” which kinda defeats the whole point of social marketing, isn’t it?

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Some advocates talk about curating (AKA moderating or censoring) the web.

But if you’re going to impose formal controls over the web, does that mean the “social web” becomes less “social” and more “formal”?

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These discussions may not seem to have a direct impact on your internet marketing business at the moment, but the intangible mechanics are sure to have a very real impact on your bottomline in the longterm.

Be sure to tune in to the Friday Podcast tomorrow, when I nail Sam Harrelson down on concepts you need to incorporate in your social media efforts. 

If you are a marketer are not going to where your leads/prospects/customers are coming from or going to, you could be putting yourself out of their traffic loop, and ultimately the monetization loop.

If you are a merchant or affiliate and primarily using the text channel – articles, blogs, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and even text ads on Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing, are you leaving yourself out of the traffic loop if your best prospects are walking around consuming their media on iPods?

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Here’s a brief rundown of my media consumption:

Text: – newspaper, magazines, books, PDFs, text blogs, email -  I am usually sitting in front of my desk, in front of my computer when consuming text-based information. A large part of it has to do with being tethered to my computer.

Even though I have a laptop (actually 2 now…) and there’re a number of Wi-Fi zones around, and even though I have an Apple Touch, I haven’t inculcated the habit of accessing the Internet while I’m away.

I guess I could Twitter while I’m in a bookstore or just walking around the mall, but it’s just not been a priority.

Maybe if I was a lifecaster (a la Truman Show) like Justin “iJustine” Ezarik, ubiquitious internet access would be a boom (Sam Harrelson AKA “Minister of Social Media” and I had a great discussion about the “cloud” for this week’s upcoming Friday Podcast).

But I’m not, so you might not see as many twits or the 4-5 blog posts you’d notice from the “ProBloggers” out there.

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Audio: Given that I’m primarily a visual person, the audio channel is something relatively new to me because I find I don’t process information as easily when it’s audio-based, rather than visual-based and printed in a book or can be viewed on-screen.

I have started listening to audio though, like the Shawn Collins-Jim Kukral-Sam Harrelson-Lisa Picarille Geekcasts (thanks for the mentions of “WhoIsAndrewWee” on the show, guys!).

But audio is not a “dedicated” medium for me – I’m usually clearing email, sort out files, cleaning my desk, checking my snail mail, sorting out paperwork while the audio is playing in the background.

I guess I have developed my awareness to the extent of being able to note down URLs, copy them onto a piece of paper and checking them out later.

The one great thing about audio is that it’s very much tied to a portable device – whether it’s an iPod, an iPhone, a smartphone or PDA with MP3 playback capability.

If you aren’t maximizing your downtime, by loading up on your knowledge -  you could very well be idling yourself into irrelevance.

Whether you’re driving, working out, or just walking to the store, I think that downtime could be easily translated into some productive “uptime”

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Video: Probably the next best thing to physically being at an event or spending time with someone is being able to catch them on video.

The affiliate blogosphere has been abuzz with why more marketers aren’t already using more video in their marketing efforts.

In my opinion, it takes time to put out a frequently updated product like Jim Kukral’s The Daily Flip. – At least an hour goes into the conceptualization, shooting, editing and posting of your video (even if it’s a 5-10 minute segment).

Figuring the “video stuff” out poses a technology-based barrier to entry from having master software that isn’t the most user friendly, to being able to work out the mechanics of streaming.

The other barrier in my mind is that the search engines are still at the rudimentary level of indexing such videos. So if you were there at the early days of meta tag and keyword tag stuffing to get ranked in the search engines, you could try out similar shenanigans with tag stuffing with videos too. (I don’t think you’d do much good for your reputation though…).

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What will it take for the Internet to go boldly beyond text to embrace audio and eventually video?

If we progress beyond DSL and cable modem-based broadband technologies to Fiber-to-the-Home where 1000 mbps speeds are a very real possibility.

Is 2008 going to be the year that video kills the tv star?

It’ll be interesting to see, but one thing’s for certain, if you aren’t already going to where your leads and prospect are, you could very well be left in the dust.

It’s always a pleasure talking to affiliate marketing veteran Rachel Honoway who’s one of the pioneers at affiliate marketing service agency Kowabunga (later acquired by Think Partnership), having started in 1997.

She’s not only friendly, but highly knowledgeable about prevailing issues in the affiliate marketplace.

If you haven’t yet, check out Partnercentric president Linda Woods’ interview with Rachel on a recent episode of Affiliate Marketing Insider.

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For this edition of the Friday Podcast, we discussed:

• Challenges for affiliate managers, especially in keeping up with your affiliates
• The chronic issues related to talented affiliate managers leaving for greener pastures and how networks can address this
• Highlights from the recent AC Certified workshop
• Why Syntryx might be the “killer app” for affiliate managers
• The rise of the Web 2.0 social/community-based affiliate
• Jim Kukral’s role in the affiliate universe (with a pointer to the Daily Flip)
• And lots of AC Certified goodness

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

To find out more, visit: AC Certified

However, you cut it and define it, there’re marketers out there who do their best to make use of Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Metacafe, Youtube, Revver, forums and other social networking site (of the “Web 2.0” ilk) to generate adsense or affiliate income.

Some of them are spectacularly successful, while others just flame up and die, and have their accounts deleted en-masse.

So is Web 2.0 a “dead” technology for marketers?

Are Web 2.0 site destined to become a dead graveyard populated by “internet polluters“?

I don’t think so.

This issue came up during the taping of a Friday Podcast session with Affiliate Classroom’s Marketing VP and affiliate marketing industry veteran Rachel Honoway.

I was pretty impressed that Web 2.0-based affiliates ranked alongside SEO, PPC, Coupon, shopping comparison and other types of profiled affiliates in Affiliate Classroom’s new AC Certified program for Affiliate Managers.

If you recall, Jim Kukral presented a session on “Bloggers as the Next Generation of Super Affiliates” at Affiliate Summit West 2007.

And it’s great to see these new generation of affiliate marketers being profiled in the new program, and even better, there’re tips for new and experienced affiliate managers to reach out to these marketers.

But back to “Web 2.0” for a second.

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, you’d pick up the thread that this new breed of affiliates is focused on building conversations/conversation marketing as Internet Geek Girl Steph Agresta would say.

It’s about relationship marketing and community marketing…permission marketing plays a part in there as well.

For it to be truly effective, you need to be able to meet your prospects needs, and not bank on using a bunch of bulletins or PMs or mass broadcasts to bombard them with irrelevant offers (even at $100 a lead…), just because the technologies let you do so.

If I had my way, I’d hit the internet and do a global “search-and-replace” and replace all references of “web 2.0” with “social traffic” or “community building”.

But then again, isn’t enforcing your opinion on a mass basis, the equivalent of “curation” (a nice politically-correct phrase for “censorship”)?

I think I like freedom of expression better, so this is going into my Twitter stream.

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Keep an eye out for the Friday Podcast with Rachel Honoway tomorrow – there’re some goodies in store.

• Co-founding the Affiliate Summit with Missy Ward (the next Affiliate Summit East is from Aug 10-12 in Boston)
• Multiple updates on his Affiliate Tip blog
• His sarcastic and wry style on Affiliate Thing (together with co-host Revenue Magazine editor Lisa Picarille)
• His relative new foray into group podcasting at Geekcast.fm together with partners-in-crime Sam Harrelson and Jim Kukral. (Jim did a video interview with me in the midst of the recent Affiliate Summit West)

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!

Here’re some of my favourites:

With the ShareResult affiliate network affiliate manager Julia Steat at the Great Affiliate Road Rally

With Notebook Forums‘ Laura Alter (yes, she is 6’ and wearing heels…)

After talking to him for about a year, I finally got to meet B5 blog network’s training manager Tris Hussey

At the social media session with Justine Ezarik and Tris Hussey

Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta at the Super Affiliate session

At the “Engaging the Media” panel session with Lisa Picarille, Anik Singal, Valerie Stevens and Jim Kukral

I don’t know about you, but I think Jim Kukral deserves some type of award for being the most photographed!

Be sure to check out the other pictures at the ASW photo collection.

Affiliate Summit as always was a blast (I still have about 500 of my own pictures to put up somewhere…).

If you’re keen to bring your affiliate business to the next level, be sure to check out Affiliate Summit East from Aug 10-12 in Boston, MA.

Uncensored and via “fake live satellite” (to quote some Jim Kukral Daily Flip parlance, we present spy video and spy pics from the hallways of the Rio.

Note: Please note that these acts are performed by pure amateurs who did not undergo any professional training. Please do not try this at home, or anywhere near beloved household pets…

The Shawn Collins video montage with obligatory pounding bass dance track back:

More photos and videos…

Revving up the Segway’s gyroscope while celebrity pit engineer John “Evil Blogger” Chow looks on.

Amit Mehta tears up the carpet in his Brian Littleton Sweatervest(TM) race attire

John Chow prepares to do his high speed wheelie into a crowd of Affiliate Summit participants. Shawn Collins revised the number of attendees from 2,500 to 2,450 attendees shortly after. A new Guiness record for most number of ambulances at an Affiliate Summit is set.

Schaaf Consulting‘s Brook Schaaf practises his “Drive-By Blessing” technique. ASW attendees report seeing the “monetization light” shortly after.

ASW attendees gasp at the life-like nature of the Madam Tussaud’s wax scale replica of Shawn Collins. The figure will also be displayed at Affiliate Summit East in Boston, MA, August 10-12, 2008.

Here’s a video Joel Comm captured of my time on the Segway.

Also check out Joel’s latest project: TextCastLive.

For more goodness, check out:
Shawn’s post about the Segway at the Affiliate Summit

Here’s what I face each time I click on my “Home” setting on my Facebook profile:

Keep scrolling…

Click on the “more” tab below and keep scrolling…

So getting on Facebook is quite a painful experience.

Being hit by irrelevant application invites, and with Facebook system where multiple people can keep sending you invites to the same app over and over again, and the best part is that you have to deny/ignore each application request one at a time, means you could be spending 15 – 30 minutes each day just getting rid of application requests…

So is this effective social marketing?

Should you still go out and develop a facebook app?

With MySpace, you would get friend-bombed and bulletin-bombed and event-invite bombed before the social network became largely socially irrelevant…unless you were a teenager with iron-like patience or maybe bopping away to your MP3 collection as you were patiently wiping…or maybe accepting every application request that came in…

That’s the one beautiful of a professional network like LinkedIn, aside from some social gamers throwing out irrelevant questions to their network every other day, the pre-screen is largely successful.

With Facebook, I’m thinking that the next Facebook app developer who comes out with the “One Facebook app” – tagline “One Application To Rule Them All” – which could do a global delete of pending application and friend requests, might just emerge the king of the mountain.

The question is, “Mountain of What?”

Social marketers, I’m keen to hear what you’ve to say, maybe Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Wayne Porter (whom I know is addicted to a particular insidious Facebook game…), Stephanie “Internet Geek Girl” Agresta, Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins, Shawn Collins, or if you the reader might like to weigh in, drop a comment below…

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory