There are many sharp folks over there sharing positive information, too.

Of course there are.

However, barring the (typical) inclusion of statement in the affiliate agreement that prohibits sites that promote illegal activity, I would hope that those folks are indeed sharp enough and care enough about this industry not to fall for the lure of a t-shirt and buy their Affiliate Summit conference passes from an affiliate who in the ‘real world’ would already have been tried, convicted and penalized for criminal behavior.

Besides, I’d be real concerned about the t-shirts if I were you, Shawn.

Quite frankly, I find it shocking that the potty-mouthed prime advocate of bad affiliate behavior is allowed to earn commissions promoting a highly reputable event like Affiliate Summit.

I certainly don’t condone any bad behavior, black hat activity, etc., but I think it’s short sighted to dismiss an entire forum membership.

There are many sharp folks over there sharing positive information, too.

This, after all, is a site operated by a guy who openly admits that “I found this gay shit called email spam, and the money potential from it without going to jail (at the time, no laws, for anything) took me out of my designing realm and over to the dark side.”

Dark side, indeed.

Look around the forum and you’ll see support for scraping tools, autoblogging, and how “a place like WickedFire can post dupe content all we want, and because of the higher authority level here within Google especially, many times WE will get the points for having the content be authored by us, and not the original source…”

He also openly facilitates theft from online marketers (AND by result, their affiliates) by running a thread that gives his forum members access to free downloads of popular affiliate marketing tutorials along with the following invitation…

“Now if you want to help out the cause, email me the ebooks you want to see posted, or send me the direct link to the members area. I don’t want your money for it, just the ebooks. Make sure to request a refund right afterwards so you don’t get charged for it, and so that these f**kers (amended for language) don’t make any money off of you either. The less cash they make, the better.”

Although the free download links in his original post now result in “Page Not Found”, new links were posted to the thread as recently as yesterday.

Quite frankly, I find it shocking that the potty-mouthed prime advocate of bad affiliate behavior is allowed to earn commissions promoting a highly reputable event like Affiliate Summit.

Jason: I think the way you present effectively polarizes the audience into one of two camps. It’s difficult to sit on the fence on this one.

Perhaps, coming from a newly developed country like Singapore, gives me a perspective on platforms like squidoo, blogger and digg helping to bridge the digital divide and lower the digital barrier between the haves and have-nots.

Perhaps your presentation was intended as a wake-up call for the corporates and large merchants to sit up and take notice of how a minority of affiliates are abusing their brand name and creating spam.

You certainly succeeded in your intent.
However, as a side effect, you’ve also created a blanket impression that search engines and social networks are overrun with ‘affiliate spam’.

As a social marketer, I use several of the platforms, in addition to forums, blogs and other social sites, you mention as a branding and marketing channel. I have not been accused of shovelling ‘affiliate spam’ on the internet.

It would have been more balanced to give more airtime to the concept of value creation and there are equal and possibly more examples of value being created, as there are in value being destroyed.

The information supply chain is very much like the brick-and-mortar supply chains you see – intermediaries – resellers, brokers, distribuors, retailers – help smooth out the inefficiencies in the supply-demand side of things.

Sure, it’d be great for product manufacturers to sell products and services directly to end users at a cheaper prices and provide higher quality of service.

But we know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

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As an add-on to your solutions for the ‘problem’, I’m sure the solution goes beyond just mahalo…

How about something more encompassing than one new tech startup on the digital landscape?

The statement that Jason made about this attitude that is prevalent these days: “because the Internet technically allows you to do something that you are within your right to do it…” is dead-on accurate, and it’s an attitude that’s incredibly toxic, and WILL kill off many legitimate current opportunities. We need to think seriously about the consequences of our actions…short-term and long-term.

The Goo(gl)se that lays the golden eggs is already harmed and overtaxed by trying to cope with indexing and ranking a badly crapped-up web. Things won’t get better unless some self-policing goes on. Because, trust me…you don’t want them to have to solve the problem for you…we all get burned when that happens.

We all know that search results and Squidoo are filled with undisclosed advertisements and spam pages. That is why in my talk I cited specific examples of searches on Technorati and google, as well as pages on Squidoo that were stolen content/spam/malware/etc.

I think the black hat SEO contingent wants to make me into some sort wack job, but the fact is I stand for something very simple: treat users well.

That’s something blackhats do not do.

I would agree with his comments if usenet users or technorati or squidoo users were morons.

Fortunately for us, there’re not, so I would classify >80% of what he’s saying as mere demagogue behavior (Merriam-Webster: a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power)
or in X-Files parlance: FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt)