Joined BUMPzee! today - it is a Digg‘esque community for affiliate marketers.  They offer a Widget to track visitors, recent blog articles and “bump” votes for newly added articles.

 Their description from their site follows:

There are lots of affiliate marketing blogs to go through. We all have our feed readers, but may miss a really good entry. If you find a blog entry that you like, come here an give it a bump.

Beyond that, Affiliate Marketing is all about relationships. And here we have the beginnings of a new community site. Keep track of all the happenings in affiliate marketing through the aggregated blog listings, local content, and make contacts with the other members, all affiliate marketers.

Create and account now and participate. Get yourself on the map. Post an RSVP to industry events. List your own blog. Start a discussion. Connect with other affiliate marketers.

To join - click here.

Of course, the program planners, the writers argue that media reflects reality.  Others would say that reality reflects media.  Now, we are all adults, aren’t we?  We are all capable of making decisions on our own.  It is too simple a thing to say that the media influences us or that we influence the media.

I have long believed in what I have observed – media very much has the capacity to influence our actions and emotions.  After all haven’t you ever found yourself laughing or crying at a movie, theatre play, or even from a familiar piece of music, and then days or even weeks later thinking about the thing which touched you?  Slowly, these things have an impact.

However, after watching things over the past few years and most recently the past few weeks, it seems that the general public can be found, at least, partially at fault for the tremendous pandering the media performs on a daily basis.  I am not certain that there is some grand conspiracy where a group of people plot to distract the masses because it appears to be our Nature to be distracted.

The interplay is like some tragic, mythic hydra where the separate heads keep cannibalizing each other and more keep growing back.

It seems a bit fantastic that we choose to be distracted by the comedy of a young mother shaving her head or the tragic losses of Anna Nicole Smith?  Albeit, I think the distraction here has a lot more to do with money than with the tragedy of Danielynn’s loss.

What should we do?  Who knows – although, I think Hercules might be inclined to torch the heads and bury the root.  Irregardless the center of the issue appears to be unending and its lifeblood poisonous and until we can admit that, we will never take steps to correct it.

So, I am digging this WordPress theme TypoXP Reloaded.  Initially it seems very cool.  It is enabled for Plug-ins, Widgets and Google AdSense.  Wow, three links in the first sentence, this blog is off & running.  The theme is being actively worked on, in fact, that the most recent update was February 10, 2007 and the author, Everton Blair, while he does not appear (via his discussion forum) to be a “Theme God,” he does appear to be seeking and receiving advice from the likes of Ajay D’Souza.  I have used some of Ajay’s themes before, and I have found them extremely functional and easy to customize.

So far, I have updated the AdSense code per the readme file provided in the *.zip which I downloaded yesterday.  So far, I am not seeing any AdSense Ads showing up.  Although, it may take a few hours for Google to figure out the content of the first article before we begin to see the ads cycle through successfully.  We will keep our eyes on this.