Every site can make money
If youve got content, you could be making money if you join Commission Junctions network. Using a tool called EnContext, CJ matches Web retailers products and ads with content on an affiliates site. This relationship lets the affiliate earn commissions through impressions, click-throughs, forms filled out, and/or products purchased. Instead of using the intrusive tools of profiling and personalization, EnContext reads the content on the affiliates site to determine which e-commerce links to push.

As a merchant, you should offer up as many different types of ads as possible. That gives the content providers and affiliates the option to select ads or links that best fit the format of their site. If youre an affiliate, you create a smart zone, or an area where the ads will be delivered. To make sure that the area is pertinent to your business, you step through a directory to filter for products appropriate to your site. The setup is completely Web-based for merchants and affiliates. Plus, theres real-time information on commissions, giving you the data on how much money youre making or spending at any time.

How does Commission Junction make money? It gets 20 percent of all commission delivered to the affiliate. Currently, Commission Junction claims more than 150,000 affiliates or content sources and 620 Web retailers.

Whose talking about Elvis?
That, and more in-the-heat-of-the-moment questions can hopefully be answered by eNow.com, a Web-based program that does real-time searches of public online chat rooms (IRC, Java-enabled chats). Known as ChatScan, its designed to scan the last five minutes of all public chats. How they pull off this monumental task, I have no idea. But the concept is way cool. The problem is that online chat is so disjointed, youd be lucky to stay on one topic for 30 seconds, let alone five minutes. Currently in beta, the program planning to go gold in two months.

ChatScan cant scan proprietary chat rooms such as those in AOL. The company is desperately working on developing that partnership. If they pull that off, it would definitely give the company the recognition it deserves.