I’m off to attend the LinkShare Summit all day today. I expect the day to be jam-packed with networking and sessions. I’m really looking forward to hearing the keynote speaker Ian Ayres, a professor at the Yale School of Management and author of the book Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart. I always get something valuable from speakers with an economic, academic or business background.

I’m also getting a little one-on-one time with LinkShare President Steve Denton this afternoon. Denton is always candid and super sharp about industry issues. I’ll share whatever comes out of that wide-ranging discussion here with you first thing next week.

Wednesday evening LinkShare hosted a dinner for the media that also included some top affiliates and merchants and the president of Jupiter Research, David Schatsky. The purpose was to share Jupiter’s research, commissioned by LinkShare, which examined online marketing, Internet shopping trends, consumer behavior tendencies, and the increasing role of Internet advertising.

While all those in attendance at the dinner have been prohibited from revealing the specifics of the survey until LinkShare publicly releases the data, I can tell you the evening’s discussion was very lively and highly thought provoking. As soon I’m given the green light to tell you about the research, I will share the findings with you.

Meanwhile, I’m off to see some familiar faces and hopefully meet some new merchants and publishers doing innovative things in the interactive marketing space.