To understand what’s at the crux of the $1 billion Viacom suit against Google for copyright infringement, look no further than the guy who has become the flash point for the suit, Stephen Colbert. Colbert spent Monday’s episode giving a platform to the debate of copyright law and fair use that is embodied by the current collision of old media content owners versus new media technologies that enable the mashing up of that content.The Colbert Report has been at the crux of the Viacom-YouTube/Google suit since Viacom first sued and highlighted the fact that copyrighted episodes of the The Colbert Report were freely available on YouTube. The Electronic Freedom Foundation then sued Viacom over YouTube’s takedown of a Colbert parody produced by MoveOn.org and Brave New Films.

On Monday’s episode, Colbert mapped out the players with skin in the game with his guest, John Perry Barlow of the EFF. Here’s an extrapolation of what he whiteboarded for the audience:

Colbert was at his subversive best as he gave platform to the EFF’s suit against Viacom and their interpretation that a parody of a parody is fair use of The Colbert Show. While he is clearly beholden to Viacom, (”they own me, baby… I am their bitch”), by giving a platform to the EFF he is emboldening the enemy of his parent company.

Watch the clip right here (via ColbertNation.com, not YouTube) to see Colbert lay it all out:

Colbert clearly “gets” what is going on with mashup culture and that value is added by allowing the market to remix and remake content that he is creating. And all of this casts a reflective glow back to his show. To showcase his point he announced the Stephen Colbert:For Your Editing Pleasure contest, encouraging views to download footage of his mock interview with PBS’s Gwen Ifill. Viewers are encouraged to edit the footage to make Colbert appear in as unflattering a light as possible and resubmit it to the show. Through this contest he is showcasing that creativity that can be unleashed when content is freely distributed, and how smart copyright owners are encouraging the remixing of their content facilitating deeper connections with their audiences.

The Blake vs. Chris Competition: BlakesCreditCards.com vs. CreditMighty.com

The Blake versus Chris competition is heating up. I woke up this morning and decided check my stats on the siteMighty account that I’ve created for the Blake versus Chris competition: CreditMighty.com. To my delight, I’ve earned my first $5 to take the early lead on my side of the competition. When I got in the office, I had Blake check his stats, and wouldn’t you know he’s sitting at $5 too. So, 27 days into the first month, the Blake versus Chris competition is tied.

Let me recap what is going on here:

We launched the Blake versus Chris competition on March 1, 2007. The competition consists of each of us building our own credit card affiliate marketing websites using our platform: siteMighty.com. We’ve got a friendly competition going in which we’re each building our own website and working on different traffic generation techniques to see who can earn the most through their siteMighty-powered site. We’re doing this for a couple reasons:

1. Proof of Concept — we felt that a live blogging approach to launching siteMighty would give us the opportunity to communicate to our users exactly what siteMighty is. It’s also a way for us to “eat our own dog food”, which is a software term for using the software you’re writing. That’s what we’re going to do, we want to prove that anyone can make money through affiliate marketing by using a siteMighty website.
2. Education — we also want to use our blogging on each of our websites to share the exact techniques that we’re using to make our siteMighty-powered sites a success. We’re blogging every step of the way about what we’re doing, and we want to build it into a valuable educational resource for other siteMighty users so they can follow it step-by-step and make money themselves.
3. Learning and Testing our Own Product — what better way for us to motivate ourselves to make siteMighty the best it can be, then to force ourselves to use it. I already have come up with several new feature ideas based on my use of siteMighty. We’ll continually be adding tools to siteMighty to ensure our success, and the success of our users.

Our goal is to simulate the environment in which our users are building siteMighty sites. This means spending a limited mount of time, working with a limited budget, and taking a step-by-step process to success. We’re going to disclose everything we’re doing so people can learn from it. So here are the rules:

• We each are launching separate siteMighty powered websites.
• We’ve constrained ourselves to marketing a budget of $250 per month each.
• We’ll blog about everything we do on our sites to share our techniques with the public.

So come check out our siteMighty Blake versus Chris competition here the two sites:

• Chris’s site — CreditMighty.com
• Blake’s site — BlakesCreditCards.com

We’ll be making periodic updates here on the Idea Fuel blog to draw attention to the competition, but most of the updates will be taking place on the sites themselves. Stay tuned as we put our own feet to the fire to prove that anyone can build a successful affiliate marketing website with siteMighty.com.

We’re getting back in the swing of things here this week after moving to our new offices. DSL’s up, phones are working (but not on our desks), and the coffee maker is humming. Most of all, we are getting back into our rhythm with the launch of siteMighty!

We wanted to share some pictures of our new office. Check them out on Flickr.

We’re really excited about our new digs. Come by and see us! Have a great weekend.

I wrote a post earlier this week about our success in building an outsourcing partnership with our team in Russia. We’ve built a strong partnership with our team, and I mentioned some of our success factors: trust, respect, and team. Today, I want to share a list of more actionable dos and dont’s for building a successful outsourcing partnership.

When you start outsourcing, DO:

1. Write great specs - Have the discipline to clearly define what you want from your outsource partners. Great specs will help you clearly define what you want, and once you have them, communicating what you want it easy.
2. Evaluate references - Check their prior work, talk to their previous clients. Nothing is a better indicator of future success than past performance.
3. Assign a project manager on both ends - Designate one person on each team responsible for all communication between each side. Without clearly defined project managers communication will break down.
4. Make deadlines matter - Let your outsourcing partner give you their estimation of when the project will be completed. Then make this deadline matter by applying financial bonuses for early completion and penalties for late.
5. Agree on communication methods ahead of time - If you will need to talk to them on the phone, make sure everyone agrees to this ahead of time. A mix of email, instant messenger, and a project management tool like Basecamp with occasional Skype calls will probably work out great.
6. Get to know each other personally - Send pictures to each other, hook up a webcam to Skype for videoconferencing. Go see them if you can. Building personal relationships will help you get through the stresses that come with outsourcing.
7. Be a good client - Respect the constraints of your relationship. You probably aren’t their only client. Their time is valuable too. Have the discipline to know what you want, write it down in a clear way, and stick to your own deadlines.
8. Keep the ball in their court - Never let a feedback request or question from them linger in your email inbox. If there is an open issue on your end, it means something is not getting done on their end. Work to keep the ball in their court at all times.
9. Pay on time - Nothing will cause a partnership to go downhill faster than not paying the bills.
10. Remember what you’re in it for - Hopefully you are getting great work at a great price. Outsourcing can be stressful at times, but remember why you are doing it. Outsourcing works.

When you start outsourcing, DON’T:

1. Just go for the cheapest provider - Too many people think outsourcing is just about saving money. Go for the mix of high quality product at a cost that works for you.
2. Be lazy - This goes along with being a good client. If you don’t work hard on your end, they won’t either. The old saying about computers applies: “garbage in, garbage out.”
3. Let the project hit the death spiral - If things seem off course from your end they probably are. You need to take back control of the project. Most often this is caused by a communication breakdown.
4. Rush them - You should have established a project deadline based on their estimate. This is the most realistic delivery date you have. Rushing them will lead to quality problems.
5. Pull the plug - Successful outsourcing is a lot of work. And you’ll learn and grow the more you do it. Don’t pull the plug on the project at the first road bump. Work through it, you’ll be glad you did.

These tips were culled from our experience in working with our team at Flatsourcing. We’d love to hear any of your thoughts and ideas. If I’ve missed something let me know. Good luck and happy outsourcing!

Being from North Louisiana, I’ve always found it interesting how different New Orleans is from the rest of the state. Traveling north from New Orleans, political views and religious beliefs get a lot more conservative once you get to Baton Rouge.

Maybe this is why Rudy Giuliani has decided to hold a fundraiser in Lafayette in May. Being a frontrunner in the race to become the Republican presidential nominee, Giuliani should find himself among friends in Lafayette. Granted, $300 a plate could buy friends in any city in Louisiana, but in New Orleans, that better be some really good jambalya.

It seems that all roads lead to Google, and sooner or later, if you’re doing anything online, you’ll be doing it with Google. But this time, I’m not going to let Google make me pee my pants. I actually think this could be a good thing for affiliate marketing as a whole.

I think most people don’t get what affiliate marketing is, and that’s a shame because it’s a really great way to market and advertise a product or service.
Google calls it Pay-Per-Action, but it’s affiliate marketing. Here’s how they define it:

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you only pay when an action occurs. So instead of buying a TV spot or a billboard enticing people to buy your t-shirts, you pay only when someone brings you a customer that actually buys a t-shirt. Your fans become your salesforce. Your customers become your salesforce. It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s what siteMighty is making accessible to everyone.

Governor Kathleen Blanco is making a televised announcement this evening at 6 p.m. I don’t think anyone knows for sure what she is going to address, but speculation assumes she will announce that she is not running for re-election. I’ll let you know what happens.

Last week at SXSW, I often found myself in conversations, and being asked about our Russian development team, Flatsourcing.com. I’d like to take in this post to tell the story behind our partnership with the team at Flatsourcing.

I’ve been working with Oleg for almost 5 years now. He was the a project manager on the creation our first website, BachelorBlowOut.com, and we’ve been working together ever since. We met through eLance, the same way that many outsourcing relationships get started. And over the last five years we’ve grown to be business partners in every sense of the word. The growth of both our businesses has been directly correlated, and we’ve developed an interdependent and symbiotic business partnership.

At this time last year I took a trip to Kazan, Russia, to meet Oleg and his partners Timur and Alex for the first time. This was incredibly enlightening experience for me. in addition to the wonderful cultural exchange that took place, we were able to solidify the partnership between our companies. Since that time our business is taken off together and we’ve become a fully integrated team, albeit separated by thousands of miles.

I’ve always felt that we’ve had a very fortunate experience with our outsourcing partners, but over the years we worked very hard to build a partnership that works. I’d like to share some of the things that make our outsourcing partnership so successful:

1. Trust - it takes time to develop the level of trust with your outsourcing partner that I’m describing above. But it’s important to take steps in that direction right from the start. This means putting systems in place to provide checks and balances for both parties for everything involved: financial transactions, deadlines, specifications, quality assurance, and communication flow. The more you put systems and best practices in place the better the level of trust you be able to establish. Our goal has always been to completely trust and empower our team in Russia, so that we don’t need to track their hours or remind them of deadlines. As we build trust on both sides of the outsourcing relationship the performance and execution has risen dramatically.
2. Respect - Another primary factor in the evolution of our partnership has been the respect with which we treat one another. A lot of people get in outsourcing relationships looking for the lowest cost provider. I believe low expectations result from looking for low-cost, and with low expectations comes poor quality results. We set high standards for the quality of our outsourced work and we have full faith that our team is capable of doing everything we ask of them. And we are treated with the highest respect by our team in Russia, deadlines are met, communications are answered, and our expectations are always exceeded.
3. Team - I believe getting outsourcing to work well is simple: do everything you would do if your outsourcing team was sitting in the office with you. Treat them as employees, empower them as business partners. Always treat them as if they were part of the team. That’s been the number one key to our success.

In addition to being prompted to write this post by the questions I received at SXSW, we also wanted to celebrate a shared success with our Flatsourcing team. Posted below is a Russian TV interview with the guys from Flatsourcing.com. enjoy getting our team and if you add any questions about outsourcing or Flatsourcing, give us a shout.

I’m so excited to finally be moving to our new offices. We’ll be busy most of the day today packing and moving, but we’ll post photos of our new space next week. Until then! Have a great weekend and happy St. Patrick’s Day!

It’s not just my neighborhood, but most of Jefferson Parish is getting connected with a Wi-Fi signals from Lake Pontchartrain to Grand Isle. From CityBusiness:

The network will likely be fixed atop schools, courthouses and parish and city buildings stretching the length of Jefferson Parish, with signals bouncing from one network receptor to the other…Once installed, Wi-Fi will allow residents to turn on their computers at any location within parish lines and immediately be plugged into the Internet. A cost to residents won’t be known until bids are secured. It was unclear Wednesday how much parish officials plan to budget for the network.