We landed in Las Vegas yesterday in preparation for Affiliate Summit West 2008. We jumped right into the thick of the conference and headed to the “Meet Market,” which gave us insight to the various affiliate companies and their myriad of offerings.

But Monday started Day One of ASW08, and here is our wrap-up …

Jason Calcanis’ Keynote

Today, the show was kicked off with an interesting keynote by the ever-controversial Jason Calcanis, CEO of Mahalo, which touts itself as a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.

Our buddy, Sam Harrelson, live blogged the keynote, which set off a firestorm of contention that you can read at Revenews and other blogs. Jason took the affiliate industry to task saying that much of the internet is polluted due to unscrupulous actions affiliate marketers, resulting in search engine results and websites that are full of spam and malware.

He did say that the web is undergoing a change for the better and noted that the trends toward less anonymity and more self-policing is beginning to push spammers out. He cited the differences between Facebook vs LinkedIn, Technoraty vs TechMeme, and Wikipedia vs Veripedia.

Calcanis has little time for those looking to make a quick buck. His main message: nuture long, loving relationships with users based on high-quality content and services. He admitted that creating those quality sites is often a slow and mundane process, and it can take about 2-3 years to build a natural audience.

His recommendations:

  • Think big … more zeros on your checks
  • Work on projects that are intrinsically interesting to you
  • Be honest and real
  • Engage other people
  • Create a dialog
  • Read Twitter feeds of the 5 most influential people in your space to really understand the trends and industry as a whole
  • Be valuable
  • Talk about other people
  • Be patient!

ContentRobot nodded our head in agreement quite a bit listening to the keynote. We often tell our new blogging clients that they will not be famous overnight and to keep at it. Cool side note: we actually met and had dinner with Jason (and a bunch of other great folks) at Todd English’s Olives restaurant.

The Show Floor
ContentRobot is always on the lookout for cool blogging tools. We found two companies of note:

Magnify.net – These guys want to help you build a video channel to encourage community and revenue.

SezWho – SezWho offer distributed context, rating and reputation services for blogs to drive you traffic.

What a great bunch we met at ASW08 today, but fun time was up. We now had to prepare for tomorrow’s speaking session, as ContentRobot is going to lead a round table discussion on WordPress. Wish us luck!