Any web developer knows that it's a lack of universal standards that can make designing and maintaining a web site unbearable. Startup venture VigLink says it's here to handle at least one consistent issue - keeping affiliate link programs bringing in the bucks. The service says it is going to go even further and recover affiliate dollars you didn't know you were losing. Sponsor The company announced today that it closed a seed investment round and it has a laundry list of technology insiders as backers, including First Round Capital, Google Ventures, LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedIn VP of Product Deep Nishar and a number of noted technology entrepreneurs. CEO Oliver Roup and Architect Rodrigo Leroux co-founded the company in March of last year and Roup told us today that the company was set to go live in the next few months. At the moment, it is still in beta-testing, but we had a quick chat with Roup over what to expect. Affiliate Marketing VigLink is looking to stand on the in-between ground of affiliate marketing, betwixt merchants and affiliates. Before we move on with the what and how, let's briefly clarify our terms. In affiliate marketing , a merchant rewards an affiliate for traffic and pays commission on purchases made by referred visitors. Referring a friend to sign on with a cell phone company and getting $10 off your next month's bill is an example of affiliate marketing. In this case, the cell phone company is the "merchant" and you are the "affiliate" or "publisher". According to VigLink's web site, more than half of all affiliate links are improperly formatted, which means that the affiliate loses out on hard earned commission dollars. If the customer cannot be tracked, the affiliate cannot get paid. The service solves this problem with a JavaScript snippet inserted into the affiliate's web site, which makes sure all links are properly formatted. Changing the Name of the Game But while formatting affiliate-links properly can be a time-consuming pain, any web developer worth their salt should be able to handle the task. It's not here that the service is going to make a difference. CEO Oliver Roup told us today that the real focus is all the money that is being lost, not only on improperly formatted links, but links to sites with affiliate programs that your site is not enrolled in. "Every time a link leaves your site, value is being created," he explained. "You should be able to capitalize on that value." The interesting new twist that VigLink introduces to the affiliate marketing game is that you don't even have to know that you're linking to a merchant to make a commission. It's almost like having an agent. If a visitor from your site makes a purchase, VigLink keeps track and collects the commission for you, taking a percentage for itself. The company's success now relies on getting some big name merchants involved. Since the service is free to affiliate members, it won't take as much to get followers on that end of the spectrum. Pending that, we think that this is an idea that could be going places. Discuss

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Automatic Affiliate-Link Insertion Service Gets Google Backing

In the first generation of the social Web, the marketing groups and public relations teams would develop reports to provide metrics for a particular campaign. They were pretty much the sole users of "social media," technologies. That's a problem as far as WiseWindow is concerned. Social media is a poor label for describing how comments, blog posts, updates and other opinions can be leveraged to gauge views across social networks and thousands of Web sites. "Labeling of it as social media has limited its potential up to now," said Marshall Toplansky, president of WiseWindow. "That is why we are calling it mass opinion business intelligence and not social media analytics." Sponsor Now, the social Web is a real-time engine. Cloud computing is a reality and a new era is upon us that allows the enterprise to mine the vast sea of comments, reviews, updates and blog posts from millions of people. We're entering an era where the social Web will serve as the main territory for performing predictive analytics. WiseWindow is using artificial intelligence technology, web crawlers and the processing power of the cloud to get real-time results for enterprise customers. For example, this means that companies may leverage the social Web to make sales forecasts and gauge the opinions of mass society to immediately understand the current opinions about its brand or those of competitors. WiseWindow calls the product Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, describing it as a service that goes beyond keyword search and click-throughs to predict market movement. According to WiseWindow, sentiment analysis has failed as a strategic research tool. When matching words, the context is lost. People use words differently to describe their sentiments. The mass amount of data available makes the process overwhelming. Instead, the WiseWindow web crawler will search for comments and other opinions across thousands of sites that are not blocked by privacy restrictions. The artificial intelligence trains itself to look for a particular topic. It brings back all related opinions. The information is then distilled for the client or made available through a web portal where the data can be analyzed. Recently, WiseWindow worked with a client from the film industry. WiseWindow used its technology to research 400 films, generating 4.5 million comments from 70,000 sites. They distilled the data to lean what is hot and what is not. As another example, , WiseWindow did research for the film, Marley and Me , starring Jennifer Anniston and Luke Wilson. The pre-release promotions featured Luke Wilson. But the comments from the Web demonstrated that Anniston had greater appeal than Wilson. As a result, the trailers were changed to feature Anniston more than Wilson. WiseWindow was founded in 2007 by Rajiv Dulepet. He has an impressive background. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford's School of Management and Engineering, spearheading the development of presidential prediction projects for both the 2004 and 2008 elections. WiseWindow started developing its technology in 2007 and began working with clients last year. The company has four patents for its web crawling, auto-classifications of opinions, relevance recognition and in statistical language applications. Discuss

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Gauging Mass Opinion: Don't Label it Social Media

Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups, let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy. Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica !), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday , "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of." That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".) However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create. Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all. But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs? Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense. What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately? Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious ? Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace. MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue. While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools. What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.? Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends. And Napster? Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio. Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic 's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands . It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike. In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them. Discuss

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10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

Aptly-named consumer trend blog TrendsSpotting just released its poll from more than 30 social media influencers. The market research presentation

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Experts Predict 2010 the Year for Social Media ROI

Spotted this evening on the U.S. government's public data web site , Data.gov . A Republican programmer at captcha provider reCAPTCHA having some fun? Hat-tip ReadWriteWeb's Marketing manager Elyssa Pallai , who stumbled upon this humor gem today. Sponsor Discuss

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Data.gov Captchas Get Political

Apple has just booted a major iPhone developer out of the iTunes App Store along with their catalog of 1,000+ apps, a number so high it represented almost 1% of all the apps in the store. The developer, Molinker Inc., has been accused of attempting to game the ratings system where application users are allowed to review the various programs using a 5-star system. As discovered by an unnamed internet user and a reader of the iPhoneography blog , the ratings scam involved a set of iPhone application reviewers who only rated Molinker apps, giving them each a five-star review. Most of the apps in question ended up with 50 or so of these five-star reviews, representing what was clearly an attempt to boost sales by pumping up ratings through artificial means. Sponsor According to the user who unearthed the scam , the highly ranked reviews were poorly written and the reviewers in question had only rated applications from Molinker. Despite this fact, one of the applications ("ColorMagic"), had made it to the front page of the App Store where it was featured under the App Store "Staff Favorites" section. (On a side note, this makes us wonder whether those "Staff Favorites" are genuine picks from Apple employees or if there's some sort of automated algorithm that simply highlights high-rated applications.) In a detailed letter to Phil Schiller , Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, the accuser noted that the developer was likely using their promo codes (every developer receives 50 per app) on 50 of their own accounts to create the reviews. Shortly after receiving the letter, Schiller confirmed that this was indeed a scam and the developer apps "have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either." Cheating Won't Get You Ahead, But What Will? While obviously we don't support unscrupulous developers who attempt to game the system in order to get ahead, we do understand the temptation. At present, the Apple iTunes Store houses over 100,000 applications and development shows no sign of slowing down. Developers who have invested their time, energy and money into building an iPhone application business are becoming desperate for ways to make sure their apps get noticed. The problem has become so bad that an entire ecosystem of "app discovery" services and websites has risen up to fill the void. Although Apple recently launched an " Apps for Everything " section on their website to allow for category-based discovery and extended their "genius" recommendation technology to include the App Store back in September, none of these solutions have really addressed the discoverability problem. For some developers, it has become a case of "desperate times call for desperate measures," apparently. We wouldn't doubt for a second that this ratings scam is the only one of its kind. It probably won't be the last one either - developers will just be more careful to not be as obvious as Molinker was. Unfortunately, the real losers here aren't the cheating developers, but iPhone owners. Without a trustworthy ratings system in place, it's harder than ever to pick out the best app from a handful of similar applications. Can you count on the stars as an indicator? Are the reviews out-of-date? Are the complaints referring to problems fixed ages ago through updates? Is the download count a true indicator of popularity? As more and more applications filled the virtual shelves, users will need a better ranking system than what's currently in place. We hope the geniuses at Apple are working on something like this right now. Discuss

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Apple Kicks Cheating Developer Out of the App Store

Fresh from the official Google blog , we have news that Google is taking a group of online scammers to court. We've all seen the ads: "Use Google to Make 1000s of Dollars!" "Easy Cash with Google: You Could be Making up to $978 a Day Working from Home!" Finally, the search giant has announced it's going to do something to protect its trademark and help spare a few suckers from getting scalped. Google is suing Pacific WebWorks and a rash of unnamed defendants. Sponsor In a joint post from search quality engineer Jason Morrison and senior litigation counsel Stacey Wexler, the company stated, "Google hasn't created or endorsed any of the sites like those described in our complaint. Misleading ads try to take advantage of consumers... As far as we can tell, thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations." The scammers' URLs will be de-indexed, and Google will also be permanently disabling AdWords accounts linked to poor user experiences. But, as Morrison and Wexler note, treating the symptoms of a scam circle is a bit like playing Whack-A-Mole. Google can bash away at the digital manifestations of these shady companies, but it's nearly impossible to get rid of them forever without going after the people involved. We hope the lawsuits go well and help to get these scammers off our tubes. Here's a brief list from Google of names associated with scam artists. These companies are not affiliated with Google in any way: Google Adwork Google ATM Google Biz Kit Google Cash Earn Google Cash Kit Google Fortune Google Marketing Kit Google Profits The Home Business Kit for Google Google StartUp Kit Google Works As always, be smart online, and remember that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. For more tips on how to avoid getting ripped off on the Internet, check out an informative Google blog pos t from this summer. Discuss

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Google Sues "Google Money" Scam Artists