In the future, we will all become micro-affiliates.

We are beginning to openly allow our activities to be tracked and monitored. For now, I am not referring to “big brother” style government monitoring, but activities we allow to be public, such as our interests, where we get our information, where we spend our money, and who we know. This information is obviously very valuable to marketing companies. Currently, advertisers are able to target our activities through contextual advertising, but it should seem obvious that contextual only begins to scratch the surface of effective marketing.

In the future, we will demand that the marketing we see is targeted to us.

If you are working online, you know your time is becoming very valuable. We are already using RSS feeds and subscriptions to filter out the information we need each day, and using social networks to keep up with our friends activities and interests. We use product reviews and comparisons to decide what we should be buying, and read specialized blogs to find out about new products on the market. Current contextual advertisements work like magazine ads, anticipating our interests based on what we are reading, however there is potential for advertisements to be much more cerebral.

Facebook attempted this with Social Ads (even applications took Facebook data into ads outside of Facebook), however they received a massive amount of backlash for showing personal product recommendations from friends without their consent. Most people were upset about this because of their privacy, however I think they should reconsider. Social ads are a great concept, as long as the people they use are being compensated with affiliate commissions.

In the future, we will help companies recommend products

When you connect our personal interests, with what we purchase and how we rate those purchases, you get information that is not only valuable to marketing companies, but valuable to other people. We are all accustomed to looking up product reviews before we purchase a product, but even those are often hard to find and hard to trust. When I purchase a product, it would be invaluable to be able to see reviews from people with similar shopping habits and interests to myself. In addition, it would be even more valuable to be able to connect with that person, and to chat with them about that product before I bought it.

In the future, we will want to help others purchase the products we recommend

The only way that we would want to give this valuable information about ourselves away, is if we are paid to, as affiliates would be. Companies should be more than happy to share revenue in order to market more efficiently. We should be able to earn micro-affiliate commissions through our shopping habits. We should be able to increase those commissions by offering product reviews. We should be able to increase our commissions further by actually making ourselves available to answer questions about products we buy.

The future is soon, so who’s doing this?

The next generation of cell phones will allow us to use GPS, the internet, and RFID to combine real-world activities with online research and tracking. The infrastructure will be there to allow online marketing techniques to follow us out into the real world – when we want it to. A company like Google, who is already a specialist in contextual marketing, could be the company to turn us all into micro-affiliates. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It makes good business sense that one day, they should organize our consumer habit information, and make it accessible to others – for a commission, please.

The bookmarks toolbar in your browser is only so big. I’ve got my top 20 or 30 links on my toolbar with the names turned off so that it’s just a row of icons, and that suits me pretty fine for my main links. But when I find a great article that I want to save for later, I always end up dumping it into the black hole called my Bookmarks.

There are many solutions to this problem out there – del.icio.us and other social bookmarking websites claim to help you organize and tag your bookmarks so you can find them later and share them – but I’ve never been able to get into the habit of using it. The bookmarks seem so unreacheable and the Firefox plugin they’ve made is clunky and hard to use – plus it takes up too much room.

Having my own website, the perfect solution for me would be to organize my bookmarks using categories and tags onto my own bookmarks page that I can access from anywhere. The best way to add bookmarks would be with a smart bookmarklet that can describe the bookmark using the title and meta tags from the page I’m bookmarking and add it to my Bookmarks page. Yeah.. it’s pretty much exactly what del.icio.us does, but somehow it feels easier and more personal.

Worried that I’d have to code this myself, I went searching for a Wordpress plugin to accomplish this, and to my surprise I found one that does exactly what I need… wpbookmarks. Unfortunately it’s been abandoned for a few years and does not work with Wordpress 2.1+

Luckily, with a little bit of work, I was able to upgrade the plugin to Wordpress 2.1+ with all of the original functionality. It works great and I’m already using it to save bookmarks. I plan to continue to update it, so I hope that the author does not mind that I’ve adopted his project. Eventually I would like to improve tagging support, make the bookmarks page searchable and better organized, implement a tag cloud and rating system, and support some sort of urgency that will indicate whether it’s a link I intend to revisit quickly or not.

You can download wpbookmarks 1.1 here. You can view the original project here.