Looks like the American Marketing Association has its eye on social networks like MySpace as the shopping malls of the Web era. The AMA came out with a survey on Friday that said 47 per cent of people would go to such sites to research Christmas gifts — and better still, 29 per cent said they would buy things there if they could. You could almost hear the “cha-ching” while reading the story.

This idea has been commented on already by (among others) Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Pete Cashmore at Mashable. As Froosh points out at HipMojo, News Corp. has been looking for ways to “monetize” MySpace ever since they paid more than half a billion dollars for it. But how best to do it? Not everyone is crazy about the idea of Wendy’s and Burger King setting up profiles for their advertising characters, and it’s hard to blame them.

So how to integrate selling things with something like MySpace — or even just regular blogs, for that matter. As Pete has mentioned, there are plenty of companies trying to solve that problem, including MyPickList.com or “social shopping” sites like Crowdstorm, Wists, ThisNext and others. But the one I think has the most potential, although it doesn’t get written about a lot, is Goodstorm and its “MeCommerce” service, which is still in early beta.

In effect, it’s a sidebar shopping widget that allows blog readers to click and buy things without ever leaving the sidebar. It needs some work, but it’s an appealing idea — click to select a book or T-shirt or DVD, then click and enter your details, then click to buy it. And 50 per cent of the revenue goes to the site that hosts the widget. Goodstorm recently launched an API developers’ contest to see what kinds of widgets people could come up with.

Bloggers talk a lot about how they do it for the love or whatever, but at the same time there’s a lot of interest in how (or if) you can generate a little income from a blog. There’s Google’s AdSense, of course, which I run here on my blog mostly out of interest — since I think I’ve made a grand total of about $3.15 (U.S.) in the past month — and there are things like BlogAds.com and Text Link Ads, (those hyperlink ads that pretend to be links but are really ads inserted into the body of a blog post, which I despise with a passion bordering on the pathological) and AdBrite.com and Industry Brains and so on.

eBay is getting in on the action — or trying to — with its recently announced (okay, it was about a month ago) eBay AdContext program, which looks a lot like a fancier version of Google’s AdSense, and even has a Flash module, which would presumably work better with MySpace blogs. It links to auctions that are relevant to the context in your post, and the blogger gets a cut of any transactions. But will bloggers take to it? Some say they want to try it out, others say they aren’t so sure.

One of the most interesting solutions I’ve seen in awhile is called MeCommerce, from a company called Good Storm (and no, I have not been compensated for this post, in case any PayPerPost critics are reading this). The coolest thing about it is how it integrates into the sidebar of your blog, can be customized to fit into your theme, and allows readers to make a transaction without even leaving the widget, or your blog. Click on the item, fill in the details and away you go — and the whole thing is verified by VeriSign. There’s a good example on the blog of co-founder Marc Scheff (who also turns out to be a gifted artist).

Will MeCommerce take off? Hard to say. It’s an elegant solution, but the products it offers so far are relatively limited (books, CDs, DVDs and T-shirts). There’s some more info on it in the comments section of this TechCrunch post, and the Motley Fool wrote about it too.