Unfortunately, the weather has gotten me down this week and I got sick mid-week.  I wasn’t able to attend the November BAAMC meeting, but here’s some other stuff I picked up this week.

• Dallas Mavericks owner and noted entrepreneur Mark Cuban was charged with insider trading on Monday.  Looks like a “he said, she said” for the time being, so we’ll see how this unfolds.
• Quick thanks to Lisa Riolo and Sam Harrelson for putting me in their blog rolls!
• This ventures into last week, but there was a big spam crackdown and many affiliate marketers saw a dramatic decrease in spam.  Check out the ABW thread with the discussions.
• In an Obama presidency, the weekly address is going to be done on YouTube instead of over the radio.
• I bought something from an infomercial this week.  Stay tuned for it’s awesomeness.  You have to admit that infomercials do work from time to time.  I’m just hoping that this product is as awesome as it seems.  (No, it’s not Listen Up or ShamWOW).
• Oh, and Ted Murphy from Izea is swimming around in cereal for fun.  And you can win!

That’s it!  Have a good weekend and get all geared up for the holiday next week!

This is a great tool for the Holidays – Giftag.  It’s brought to us by the same team that developed Best Buy’s internal employee social network Blue Shirt Nation.  Giftag is a wish list on steroids, an add-on for your browser that allows you to add any product to your wish list while browsing the internet with minimal clicks.

Since a lot of the things I usually put on my own wish lists don’t just come from Amazon and other popular mega online retailers, I’ve been using a different third-party website to collaborate my wish lists for Christmas and my birthday for a couple years now.  While it was a good free option, it was sort of a hassle because you have to enter in the manufacturer, website URL, retailer, price, category, and a description to get a well organized list.  And you had to have multiple windows or tabs open to do so, entering in these details on their website while looking at the product in another.

Sure it was easy enough to share via email, and easy for anyone to see it.  But it was very plain.

Not Giftag.  The added benefit of it being a browser add-on is phenomenally convenient.  As I’m browsing, should I click on a link randomly and be taken to a product I desire to add to my wish list, I simply click the icon in my Firefox toolbar and a window pops up, allowing me to select what part of the image I want to include on my wish list.  In essence, what the add-on is doing is taking a screen shot.  Now, in the demo video on the Giftag website, they show the user dragging a square over the entire item picture and description, but for my tastes I just drag the box over the picture of the item.  A footer bar expands in the browser window to allow the user to edit the name of the product, add tags, and add a description.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Screen shot of my List"][/caption]

I’m a bit anal-retentive about how organized my lists are, so I usually copy the description from the website before I click the Giftag button and paste it into this area, along with any specifics to my gift, such as what size or color I want. And remember, I can add products from any site; no Best Buy embargo here.  The best thing about Giftag is that you can share the list using the ShareThis service, so sharing it through e-mail, MySpace, SMS texts, AIM, blog posts, and other social networks is all available!  From the home page you can also see recent items that other users have added to their wish lists, and friend up users with similar tastes or friends to share wish lists directly through the Giftag site.  This truly is the wishlist of web 2.0!

The demo videos they’ve put up are the best seller to this amazing free service, just in time for the holidays, so check it out at www.Giftag.com!

I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s really taken note of Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker since his moving keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2008. Last week, Booker appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and gave a great interview on what an Obama presidency means to him and to America.  It was very reminiscent of the keynote speech – inspiring and motivating – so I felt it best to share.  Remember that his words can inspire you on a number of levels – which can boost your motivation to chase your own American dream and work harder to reach your goals in both business and pleasure.

I’m a Bill Maher fan from way back in his Politically Incorrect days, and I was glad that he seemed to really appreciate what Mayor Booker had to say and, apart from the occasional jabs about not having to ask a question before Booker spit out an answer, he was a really gracious interviewer.  Among some of the inspiring things he had to say, here’s one of the better nuggets:

We, as Americans, drink deeply from wells that we did not dig. This generation that I live in had so many sacrifices of those who’ve come before us, and the best thing we can do is show some measure of sacrifice to honor those people who bled on beaches from Normandy to Midway for us, or who stood on line to register people to vote back in the day that you could get killed for doing that. So, I’m not about a position. I’m really about a purpose, and I think we are a purpose-driven country. And I think it’s time that we exalt all of the spaces of our nation, that we honor the sacred nature of human dignity and human life, and try to make the idea of democracy more emboldened and more inclusive, so that all of us enjoy the fruits of this great nation.

You can listen to the entire episode (140) as a podcast through iTunes. Here’s the video clip of the segment with Mayor Booker via satellite on Real Time with Bill Maher: