It’s been a busy week. Many of you are trying to ramp up online marketing campaigns for the fast-approaching holiday season while trying to usher the kids back to school and settle into a new daily routine.

I’m finally able look up for more than two minutes this week. That means that cleaning off my desk and my cleaning out my inbox before the big three-day weekend. Here are some things I found during my frenzy that I thought I’d share.

Where do I start? The Affiliate Summit is over! Oh, you want more info? Okay let me give you the quick run down.

Before the Summit officially kicked off there was the Affiliate Dinner, which roasted FlamingoWorld.com’s head bird, Connie Berg. It featured truly hilarious videos from the Brother’s Schaaf (Brook and Forrest) and one from Missy Ward that had people rolling in the aisles. If you know Connie and missed the special issue of Revenue dedicated solely to Connie, email me and I’ll send it to you. Or maybe I can get the Web folks here to post the PDFs.

I’m headed out to Boston at the end of the week to attend the Affiliate Summit East 08. Here are some things you need to know about Revenue at the Affiliate Summit.

Nearly everything I’m doing and thinking about this week is focused on Affiliate Summit East 2008. For me, it’s not just preparing for the actual event, but the whole experience of going to back to Boston for the first time in two years. Plus, I’m taking a very short vacation to visit with my family in Western Massachusetts after the show.

I used to be able to count on one hand the must-attend shows and conferences related to online marketing for a given year. Plotting out my travel schedule wasn’t much trouble and there wasn’t really any overlap among shows. And for the most part I was also able to tack on a few personal and vacation days to most of my trips in order to simulate actually having a “vacation”.

I like to use events as milestones to get things. Lots of times I’ll just pick a show or conference and decided that I must have X,Y, and Z all finished before, say, Affiliate Summit in Boston. When I initially make the plan, the event always seems so far off – giving me plenty of time to plow through the long list of must-do’s. But along the way other things crop up, I get sidetracked, or I find some other excuse to delay doing what needs to be done.

I’ve finally returned from New York and the LinkShare Symposium. It was a great time catching up with merchants, publishers and LinkShare executive. I also enjoyed attending the Golden Link Awards on Monday night. It’s so much fun to see everyone get all dolled up and it’s not just the ladies that look like a million bucks.

It’s not just the summer heat wave. There’s lots of debate and discussion where people are fired up about the possible formation of an industry trade association.

I recommend you check out the threads about the topics on the online forums – ABestWeb is a great one. There are many different opinions on the topic. I like that people in the online community are smart, vocal, passionate and opinionated.

Revenue is pleased to be nominated for a 2008 LinkShare Golden Link Award for the Performance Marketing’s Most Vocal Advocate. This is the same category we were nominated in last year, but lost to the fabulous Kellie Stevens of AffiliateFairPlay.com.