Last week I had the delight of being interviewed by Mike Buechele and Trisha Lyn Fawver for their Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast on GeekCast Radio.

They’re currently conducting a series of interviews with some speakers at the upcoming Affiliate Summit East (8/15 through 8/17 in NYC).  In the interview, we discuss my work at Adknowledge, APIs in the affiliate space, plus some Lewis Carroll trivia.

If you’d like to give it a listen, please head on over to GeekCast.fm.  Let me know what you think on Twitter.

Randy Pausch died today.  He became famous over the past year after delivering his inspirational last lecture about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” at Carnegie Mellon shortly after learning that he had pancreatic cancer and only months to live.  My thoughts are with his family and friends.

Donations can be made to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund (www.cmu.edu/giving/pausch).

You can watch his “Last Lecture” here.

I recently wrote an article for Website Magazine that will be published in the August issue.  The article covers deal negotiation with Internet ad networks and affiliate programs, maximizing your site’s earning potential, and how to conduct the legwork to put you in good positioning for a higher revenue share from your ad provider.

The article will be out in a few weeks, so head over to their site now for a free subscription.

Website Magazine is published quarterly in both print and digital editions, and focuses exclusively on the business of running a website.  It is read by over 135,000 industry professionals and has the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.

First, let me say the primary purpose of this blog is not to make money… it’s to share my personal thoughts and insights on numerous topics (primarily technology, politics, and American culture), and to hopefully spur some thoughtful discourse in return. For this reason, the blog as a whole can appear very disjointed, and I doubt that a very large body of readers would accumulate. If I was in this to make serious money, I’d stick to a single topic.

Nevertheless, I do include advertising on Politivi for several reasons:

1. It’s my job to stay current on Internet advertising and marketing trends. I work in affiliate marketing, so it is important that I stay ahead of the game. This blog (and other sites I have), allows me to be an engaged user of my own team’s product, as well as the web advertising solutions that other firms offer.
2. Advertising helps offset the hosting costs.
3. It’s fun to make a few pennies off of my work.

In addition to the normal sponsored ads/links that are clearly labeled, the content of this blog will sometimes include unmarked affiliate links (within a post’s body, as well as other places) to sites like Shopzilla, BizRate, Amazon, et al. The reasons for doing this are congruent with the reasons enumerated above. Beyond this, it’s just annoying to point out each time such a link occurs (plus you can usually see in the browser’s status bar if such a link is affiliate-encoded).

To be clear, none of the opinions expressed on this site are influenced by any advertisers. I take full responsibility for the nonsense expressed herein.