The phenomena of Blogging is quite interesting. While the impact of blogging on contemporary internet culture appears to be well-recognized and publicized few people/companies have been trying to explore the impact of blogging on e-commerce and on commerce in general. Due to the "popular demand" (I got a lot of overseas students in my classes) I've started a http://immigrationandstudyaustralia.blogspot.com/ Blog about working, studying and immigrating to Australia. While I was very sceptical about the "marketing powers of blogging" for a trivial Blog like mine, I have followed my students advice and placed Google ads and search engine at the top of the Blog. To my great surprise, My Blog (that is aimed at a fairly narrow target audience) earned me about $12 in two days. I have not done any promotional work for the Blog outside my classroom, family and friends etc. I have not even submitted it to any of the search engines yet! Yet, the "word-of-mouth" referrals alone appear to be delivering a fairly good response rate. I think it would be very interesting to do some research on the impact of Blogs on the Internet Culture as well as on commercial viability of Blogging (now that my Blog is earning me some minor income I am becoming a believer in the future of commercial blogging). Yours sincerely, Michael Baron Lecturer CQU (Melbourne Campus) On 10/19/06, Yukari Seko <yukaseko@yorku.ca> wrote:

Dear AOIRists,

Hi, I am Yukari Seko, a second-year MA student at York/Ryerson University Communication and Culture programme. I am currently working on my MA thesis about suicidal/self-injury blogs, focusing on self-injury community at LiveJournal.com.

As a part of my research on blog in general, I am interested in "affiliate marketing" system emerging in blog sphere. In my understanding, the affiliate marketing is a sort of novice method of e-business in which an affiliate is reworded for every visitor or reader provided through his/her efforts. For instance, pay-per-click or pay-per-sale kinds of stuff which offers the owner of site/blog by his/her promotion of sponsors (web hosting services).

Currently I am writing a blog in Japanese using a blog service hosted by Amazon.co.jp. At the beginning of this month (October 2006), the provider suddenly changed the whole system and informed me that I have earned some e-credit because of my reader clicked the ads on my blog. It also mentioned about if I would "promote" some products made by Amazon and cooperate companies in my blog, I could gain more e-credit and get a cash back. I was so surprised to know that I was unconsciously incorporated into the affiliate marketing system. In other words, I just found myself making audience commodity for the sale of advertisers. Or maybe I am becoming an opinion reader in blogsphere... Anyways, it made me concern about the advertising structure of blogsphere.

So, if someone knows any useful resources/references about "affiliate marketing + blog," could you let me know?

Thanks in advance,

Yukari Seko -- M.A. candidate Joint Programme in Communication and Culture Studies Between York/Ryerson Universities Comcult GSA Webmaster (York) http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/ yukaseko@yorku.ca _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

-- "My Body is my Temple" "Be The Change You Want to See In The World." Gandhi