I’ve spent much of the week at Web 2.0 Expo. Man, the show was good and very well attended. It was also super well organized. And the Blogtropul.us (a room for bloggers) was hopping with people streaming live, blogging, doing video and writing up real time accounts from the show. There was even yoga happening in there.

The panel I was on (The Changing Landscape of Affiliate Marketing: Bloggers, Social Media, & Online Merchants ) was bright and early on Wednesday morning and went very well. I’ll confess that despite the impressive lineup of panelist (Sam Harrelson of Sam Harrelson Consulting, Stephanie Argesta of Stephanie Agresta Consulting, and Cam Balzer, the director of search strategies at Performics), I thought the 8:30 start time would deter people from attending. But to my surprise, our big room was crowded and the attendees were awake and lively.

The panel was a free flowing discussion of how social media impacts affiliate marketing – the challenges, the benefits and the potential obstacles.

One clear thing from the panel - all the speakers are big fans of Twitter and encouraged everyone to join Twitter. Truthfully, it was like a Twitter love fest up there on stage. In fact, Marc Levin (dogballs.com and formerly of Yahoo) our moderator, was at times showing his live Twitter stream on the screen.

We also talked about the evolving role of the networks in the affiliate equation. Cam Balzer, vice president of search at Performics, talked about the value and scale provided by the networks. I took the position that in a maturing industry the role of a middleman (which the network is) can often be challenged from both ends (in this case merchants and publishers). And that if the networks are not able to keep up with implementing changes and leveraging the latest technologies, others will step in and fill in the gap. For me, that’s great news. That sort of market pressure (hopefully) keeps the networks on their toes while the competition (or serious threat of it) means that publishers can expect innovations and that if there is a gap or a problem – some third party provide is going to step up to the plate with a solution.

We also talked about examples of merchants doing very well at leveraging social media. JetBlue, Southwest airlines, Jones Soda, H.R. Block were applauded for their extensive efforts to join the conversation and engage their customers on a variety of social media including Twitter and Facebook.

There was much more discussed and some great questions from the audience, but I have to run out to catch day four of the show.