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

It's exciting for us to see young companies like Jive grow so fast. But before we pop the champagne bottles, it's important to take these results with a grain of salt. Jive announced today that it had record results for the past year, up 85%. That's impressive in the sense that Jive is proving that its technology is gaining acceptance in the market and the fact that the company, founded in 2001, is almost 10 years old. But we also need to consider that with any young company, there's a lot riding on news like this. Sponsor Jive has some big-league investors . It's critical that Jive shows them that all is going well and the road ahead is paved with gold. That may well be the case. Jive is an important player in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 space. Along with its record revenues, Jive also announced that its bookings are up and its employee count now stands at 200 people, up 50%. Also, its Jive World event in 2010 will be twice as big as last year's. So, hats off to Jive in that regard for showing us, as an example, that its employee count is up. They are doing well, no doubt about it. But we have no idea how the results compare to last year and what the size of these deals look like. Jive does not share this information, as is the case with most private companies. It is up to us to make our own judgements about what's really is meaningful. We made the same point last week about Socialtext posting record results. We were equally curious about its results, too. All of these companies reporting great news is a sign that the Enterprise 2.0 space is growing, but we need to be careful not to get too excited. Young companies can grow very fast. But it's all relative compared to big companies. Numbers can look impressive but more often than not, you need to look at a number of factors before making any quick calls on how the company is actually faring in the market. Discuss

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Enterprise 2.0 Company Results: How Good is Good News?

According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties. Sponsor In Google's example, the software could identify the marquis and individual window posters on a theater property and replace them with new information. Through this, a theater could promote a new play in Street View, even if the actual Street View image is completely out of date. The patent describes a two-step process for identifying potential advertising real estate in these images. Google's software first identifies interest points in the image (e.g. the edges or corners of an object) and then generates features around these interest points. Google can then augment this region of the image with a link or replace a part of the current Street View image with a new image. What Happens When Somebody Wants to Put a Virtual Ad on Your Real-Life Billboard? One of the most interesting aspects of the patent can be found in the following paragraph: The link can be associated with a property owner, for example the property owner which owns the physical property portrayed. The link can alternatively be associated with an advertiser who placed the highest bid on the image recognized within the region of interest (e.g., poster, billboard, banner, etc.). Any portion of the geographic display image in which the region of interest is located can be selectable (e.g., hot-linked). For example, the image of the coffee shop can be hot-linked to an advertisement for the coffee shop. This does open up some interesting questions. It makes perfect sense for the owner of a local coffee shop to advertise through this system, but in this patent, Google also describes an advertising auction. Does that mean that a rival coffee shop could also bid for ad space on the virtual image of a competitor's store in Street View? Chances are this isn't quite what Google has in mind, though it could definitely be a possibility. Instead, it looks like Google could potentially identify some billboards and banners in Street View images and then replace these real-life billboards with virtual ads from the highest bidders. Discuss

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Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View

The American Dialect Society (ADS) has named google - the verb - as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to "search the Internet") won out over blog, which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS's New Word Committee, "just sounds ugly." Tweet was named the top word of the year for 2009. Fail - "a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful" - was 2009's most useful word. Sponsor Definitions: Tweet : noun , a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message. Google : Verb meaning "to search the Internet." Generic form of the trademarked "Google," the world's dominant Internet search engine. Fail : A noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful. Usually written as "FAIL!" The ADS's members include linguists, grammarians, etymologists, writers, editors and university students. The ADS was founded in 1889. Twitter and other social networks have clearly captured the imagination of many language societies. Twitter was the top word of in the Global Language Monitor 's survey, and unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the year. To represent the 1990s, the ADS picked Web as the top word of the decade. Do You Agree? What do you think? Do you think google deserves to be the one word that represents the last decade? Or is this just another example of how Google is succeeding in its slow takeover of our culture? Discuss

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Google: The Word of the Decade

While Google continues to digitize everything from the view from the driver's seat to the contents of your appointment book , their tremendous attempt at digitizing the written word, Google Books , has run into a snag in the most ironic of places - China. While the country is infamous for copyright infringement , especially of intellectual property, it too is working to prevent the unfair use of its citizen's copyrighted works. Bloomberg reported this morning that Google "has agreed to meet demands from a local writers' group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company's online library without authors' permission." Sponsor The company found itself in a Chinese court last month facing allegations of copyright infringement by Chinese author Mian Mian, whose book can still be seen in preview on the Google service . This certainly isn't the first time Google has run into complaints over its practices with the project. Last month, the company was convicted of violating France's copyright laws . A Globe and Mail report on Google's practices stated that over 80% of the French books offered were still under copyright. The company has also faced criticism in Germany over its Google Books service, where today the German minister of Justice warned that the company may be reaching monopoly status, requiring government intervention. The Bloomberg article notes that in China, Google trails behind the search engine Baidu . This is in a country with more Internet users than the entire population of the United States. But is the problem of supposed copyright infringement a public relations issue in a country where the average consumer sees counterfeit products in nearly every storefront window? While we stand on the side of writers getting paid for their work, we're not sure this issue would really stand in the way of Google gaining popularity in China. Discuss

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Google Faces Copyright Trial in Chinese Courts

As we reported last week , Firefox's latest version of 3.6, release candidate 1, has been released to the general public . This time around, however, Mozilla has issued a more general release, as the new version will not only be available for download but also part of an automatic update for those already running Firefox. The release is one more sign that we're getting closer by the day to a full-on sparkly new version of Firefox. For those of you worried about updating, Mozilla has assured us that "over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6," so go ahead and take that leap. But what will you find on the other side? Sponsor Firefox 3.6 RC1 Features In addition with offering this release as an automatic update, Mozilla has offered a synopsis of what it sees as the most important new features to be found in what the company hopes to be a near final version. Users can change the browser's appearance with a single click using Personas . Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe. Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability. Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history. Open, native video can now be displayed full screen , and supports poster frames . Support for the WOFF font format. Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time. The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times. Support for the HTML5 File API Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies. While wallpapering Firefox with the latest blockbuster movie may be an attractive addition, we are looking forward to a faster and more stable Firefox. Loading scripts asynchronously should speed up some page load-times dramatically by letting faster scripts run while slower ones continue to do their work in the background - something our computers have been doing for a long time now. And the changes to third-party software integration should offer a huge boost to the browser's stability by keeping the core components of the browser safe from being modified. For the web developers out there, increased support for CSS, DOM and HTML5 is always a welcome addition, and the addition of the WOFF font format may further help page load-times and give web designers a greater range of choice. Discuss

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New Firefox Release...One Last Time?

When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter , we often run across the objection that they really don't care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world's most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch? Well, SemanticHacker , the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise , has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat. Sponsor Parlez vous Twitterspeak? The blog used Twitter's streaming API to gather nearly 9 million tweets from over 2 million individual users. Before looking at the data for meaning, the company first took a look at the language distribution of their sample. While the SemanticHacker team expressed their surprise at the language distribution, particularly the strong showing of Portuguese, we at ReadWriteWeb couldn't help but wonder about the 10% labeled as "Unknown/Misclassified." Are these tweets simply so horribly misspelled that the language-guessing program they used on the data could not venture a guess? Or could it be that 10% of the Twitter populous is now writing in that contracted form of text message Twitter-speak that it could no longer be classified as a recognizable language? (If you're looking for a good example, find a 12-year-old and exchange text messages or just give Sarah Palin's Twitter a look.) What We're A-Twittering About The folks at SemanticHacker then took a random sample of 1,000 English-language tweets and broke them down into eight categories. According to their findings, it seems that Twitter really is full of people talking about themselves. A full 57% of the sample falls into tweets about what a person is doing, or private conversations between individuals. That leaves just 43% for other purposes, but when we take a look at that, the findings seem to become even more dismal. If we take away another 8% for "Other Messages" and "Unknown," and another 8% for "Spam" and "Advertising," we're left with a mere 27% of the information on Twitter having some sort of value. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, though. We're willing to bet that if we wrote down everything we said in a day, the meaningful parts might not even reach the 27% mark. Oh, did I tell you about the tasty lentils I had for lunch today? Discuss

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Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?