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Listen above, on GeekCast.fm or download to iTunes.

Lisa Picarille (@lisap), who is a consultant specializing in social media, online marketing and content creation, was the moderator for this week’s show. You can find her blogging at lisapicarille.com

The panelists this week were:

Karen Garcia (@karengarcia), co-founder of GTO Management and Ultimate Foodie.

And me (@missyward) co-founder of Affiliate Summit and co-editor-in-chief of FeedFront magazine.

Here are some of the things we talked about:

My new podcast Big Mouth Strikes Again where she interviews all sorts of industry leaders and wise guys

Affiliate Marketers Give Back: I’m leading a team of great folks participating in the 40-mile Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in Los Angeles and why championing the boobies is important to me.

The Problem Solvers session at the upcoming Affiliate Summit in New York lets attendees get expert advice and donate some funds that will benefit Big Brothers and Big Sisters of New York City.

Karen’s firm, GTO Management, will once again be sponsoring the Christian Affiliate Marketers Association (CAMA) brunch at ASE09. It’ll be at the historic Cotton Club.

At the end of the show we got to the advertising tax issues:

Tax and crabs – mmmmm!

The advertising tax news was mixed for other states. But we all send Arnold a big shout out for keeping affiliates on track in California. Also Overstock will continue to do business with California affiliates. And a warm Aloha to Governor Linda Lingle of Hawaii, who seemed to be influenced by the affiliate rally.

We also decided that to hammer home the issue about affiliates and taxes, the industry needs a charismatic, powerful spokesperson.

Affiliate Summit and buy.at, will be hosting our Tax Talk and Crab Feast this Thursday, July 9th in Baltimore at the buy.at office.

Shawn Collins and I will be giving a brief presentation covering the fundamentals of Advertising Tax; how it affects small businesses; and what people can do to help fight it.

We plan on taping the presentation to make it available to folks who won’t be able to join us in Baltimore. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the slides above or download at http://www.slideshare.net/affsum/advertising-tax-primer.

A small sigh of relief was heard around Affiliateland when today’s hearing in California regarding Assembly Bill 178 (“AB 178″) was canceled.

In a nutshell, AB 178 is now a two-year bill which signifies its death, for this year anyway.

Unfortunately, lawmakers can use a practice known as “GANDA” (Gut-and-Amend), during the final days of a legislative session in which the entire contents of another bill can be stripped out and replaced with the contents of AB 178.

It may take a few times to finally put this issue to bed, but in the meantime it looks like California’s small business owners are temporarily safe.

Great work by the whole crew who banged on the doors of California’s legislators to get them to understand the ramifications of #advertising tax.

Some bad news… Hawaii’s HB105 has risen from the dead.

Last week, Hawaiian small businesses in the affiliate marketing industry breathed a little easier when the nexus language was removed from the bill by the Senate.

Unfortunately, when the bill went back to the House this week, the nexus language was added back in.

The lobbyists working with the Performance Marketing Association are trying to get more details on what transpired. Additional information will be provided shortly pertaining to the legislators to contact in order to fight this bill.

Amazon has already noted in this public letter (page 6) that they are prepared to terminate all of their relationships with the small businesses in Hawaii that are working with them on a performance basis.

I’m quite certain that there are more companies that will follow in Amazon’s footsteps should this legislation pass.

This session ends on May 7th. It’s extremely important when you’re contacting your representatives to let them know that this is a losing proposition all around. Hawaii will not get the sales tax revenues that they’re expecting because the merchants like Amazon will simply terminate their relationships with marketers in Hawaii. The small businesses performing the marketing will experience a loss of income. Hawaii loses the income tax from those marketers.

Where is the logic in any of that?

Maryland affiliates can breathe a little easier today as Senate Bill 1071 didn’t make it out of committee before the Session ended last night.

A big w00t goes out to all of the affiliate marketers and Lobbyists that worked on the crusade.

Although the bill will likely make a comeback during the next session, we now have the luxury of time on our side to focus on contacting Maryland’s Representatives and Senators to make sure they understand the ramifications of passing this type of legislation.

But, NOW is the time to concentrate our efforts on Connecticut’s SB 806 (which is ready to be debated in the Senate as early as today) and and Minnesota’s SF 282 (scheduled for the Committee on Taxes on April 16th)

It’s so important to get in touch with these state’s representatives to let them know that they will be putting thousands of small businesses that are in the affiliate marketing industry, out of business should this type of legislation pass.

The Performance Marketing Association has created templated correspondence to contend with Connecticut making it easy for you to contact the representatives. That information can be found here

Below is the person you should contact regarding Minnesota’s SF282:
Senator Thomas M. Bakk – the sponsor of SF282
Email Form
651.296.8881

In your conversations with these representatives make sure that you let them know that similar efforts regarding nexus have been quelled in Virginia, Hawaii and now Maryland!

My post earlier this week, “California to Stomp on Small Business Owners“, has spurred a lot of online retailers and affiliate marketers to contact me to find out exactly how they’re going to be affected by the pending legislation in California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Tennessee, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina and possibly now Florida.

While I’d love to talk to each of you individually, I’m falling way behind in getting back to you and my day job, so please consider this my personal apology.

That being said, Shawn Collins just put up a brief 2-minute video explaining the threat and implications of this unconstitutional “Advertising Tax (also known as “Amazon Tax” or “Affiliate Tax”.)

In the video, he further explains what you can do to help fight this legislation and resources available to make it easy.

So whether your an online merchant, affiliate network, advertising network, affiliate marketer, online publisher, or simply care about protecting the U.S. Constitution, it’s imperative that you take action.

When all this comes down in your state, be sure to note how your representative(s) voted and then put them out of a job at the next election if they voted against your livelihood.