Tag Archives: amazon

Amazon.com Reviewer Ranks Shift

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This morning I realized that my good ole Top 100 Amazon.com reviewer status had been shifted as a result of a change of the way Amazon calculates the rankings of reviewers. Based on the new method, I am reviewer #148 (though they say the reviewer standings would be recalculated on a daily basis).

Actually, that seems more fair and a reflection of the fact that (due to all other things going on in my life these days) I am not as prolific in my Amazon.com reviewing as I used to be.

Here is how Amazon summarizes the changes:
* Review helpfulness plays a larger part in determining rank. Writing thousands of reviews that customers don’t find helpful won’t move a reviewer up in the standings.
* The more recently a review is written, the greater its impact on rank. This way, as new customers share their experiences with Amazon’s ever-widening selection of products, they’ll have a chance to be recognized as top reviewers.
* Amazon has changed the way they measure review quality to ensure that every customer’s vote counts. Stuffing the ballot box won’t affect rank. In fact, such votes won’t even be counted.

I am very glad with these changes: the wisdom of the masses playing an even MORE important role.

Can Amazon MP3 Kick iTunes' Musical Butt?

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If Amazon is going to offer good quality MP3s for less, I sure hope they take over this space. I’ve long been a fan of Amazon (though I admit my respect for all things Apple has evolved in the course of the past couple of years).

But I am not in love of the idea of paying more for something when I can (legally) get it for less. The case in question: I had a gift cert to put to use in Amazon and I decided to give their MP3 store a shot to download an album I’d long wanted to get: The Wizard of Oz. I found it one dollar cheaper in Amazon MP3 than in iTunes. ;)

Going To Bed With an Electronic Book

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One of the biggest annoyances I have always thought of in terms of electronic books (eBooks, downloadables, etc.) and reading them on a gadget has been: would I go to bed with this book? Would I read it while lying on my pillow?

Last week, thanks to Henkel, I learned about Kindle, Amazon.com’s new wireless reading device. Here is an excerpt from the Kindle development team:

We designed Kindle to provide an exceptional reading experience. Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen. Kindle is also easy on the fingertips. It never becomes hot and is designed for ambidextrous use so both “lefties” and “righties” can read comfortably at any angle for long periods of time.

So, are you going to go to bed with Kindle?

Taxable Amazon and eBay Sales?

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I was just reading about plans to pass legislation that would allow sales made through Amazon or eBay to be taxable starting next year.

I wonder the scope of this, whether it will apply to used goods as well, because I’ve always heard that selling some of your used stuff is much like an online yard sale.

I can only imagine this would affect businesses that conduct these kids of sales as part of their revenue… or not?

To Tag or Not To Tag

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That is the question, isn’t it? Well, maybe not that much of a dilemma, I know. But there sure are those (like myself) who find themselves tagging all photos, videos and blog posts they create, before leaving them floating around, right?

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those for whom the term “tag” means close to nothing. Tags (as metadata) were not here a couple of years ago, and the world was just fine without them, wasn’t it?

So, how useful are tags in the end? As food for thought, Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer at Yahoo!, shares some interesting insights on the utility of tagging in his blog.

Me? I’ve found tagging to be very useful, since I “discovered” it. In Flickr, del.icio.us and my blog, I tag items to help with the easy retrieval of information, giving items tags that serve as metadata. However, I also tag items for a little less selfless purposes.

In Amazon.com, for instance, I also tag items I plan on reviewing with the word “review“, instead of adding them to my Wish List (most of them I alread have in my hands). Think of it as a server-side means of bookmarking my list of “to review” items.

A similar use could be tagging items you think may be a good birthday present for your spouse or a good Christmas gift for your mom. Pretty useless to the rest of the Amazon users, perhaps, but very useful to those creating the tag.

Do you have any other “special” uses for tagging you’d like to share?

Amapedia?

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A little weird. That is the way to describe Amazon’s stab at establishing a wiki-based online encyclopedia (read a Wikipedia). They appropriately called it Amapedia.

The concept is simple: a “community for sharing information about the products you like the most,” as stated on their ‘About’ page.

I guess what I have found to be weirdest was not as much that it pushes the Amapedia content for specific articles listed in Amazon into the Product page (which makes a bit of sense), but the fact that you can access the aggregate “encyclopedic wisdom of the community of Amazon users around each of the articles they share information on” in something different than the product page, or in short, that they are putting together an encyclopedia around the products they carry

Why not make the Amapedia content drive the Product Details on every product page? I know it’s pretty “out there”, but THAT would be innovative. Want to take baby steps? Have Wiki technology to drive the functionality for the “Would you like to update product info?” links at the bottom of every page. That would work too. But using wiki technology the way it got implemented here just feels too “me too” to me and a direct competition against Amazon’s own review system, one that has established a solid reputation.

Most importantly, it just feels like users already have quite a bit of content they are creating, as this blogger puts it (not without irony):

Users are being asked to generate a lot more content these days. With all of my Wikipedia editing and Delicious linking and Flickr photographing and Digg digging, I’m already doing everything I can to keep the Web 2.0 bubble afloat…

I am going to pass on this bandwagon. I am not one to be right about everything, so for all I know I may be wrong, but quite simply I have enough keeping up with my Amazon reviews and my own share of Web 2.0 sites too. :)

ScoutPal: Like Hunting With Radar

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I was reading through the Community-written book We Are Smarter Than Me and ran into a true pearl that I felt compelled to share. It’s an application called ScoutPal. Think of this scenario (I know I lived it a few years ago, when I gave a shot to book scouting to turn around and sell my findings in Amazon for a profit. From the web site:

Just enter the ISBNs or UPCs, and ScoutPal will “Fetch” the information you need, and quickly present it to you in a concise form. Results include a summary of market prices and quantities, sales rank, editions and availability, and used/new/collectible details.

Simple, but powerful: now those out there, scouting for the best deals can make optimal buying decisions with solid data in their hands (quite literally). All made possible thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Social Networks and Shopping

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I was surfing through Mathew Ingram’s work blog and ran into a very interesting post on shopping and social networks.

He made some excellent points, analyzing a recent USA Today article on the topic, which pushed the concept of shopping as an opportunity being left on the table in some of the large Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) At the end of the day, we gotta realize that not just because something hasn’t been done, does it make the best sense to do it.

The concept of shopping and social networks makes sense in my mind as long as you are not only giving the people the tools to buy things, but mostly in terms of empowering individuals to help each other out to make the best shopping decisions. For years I’ve been a loyal Amazon.com customer and always found that they had a fantastic opportunity to give tools to enable their community of users to interact and discuss beyond the ability to just post reviews about items they offered for sale, that they were not leveraging.

They took a long time to open up the site to comments under each review posted, but eventually they did it and now there’s more than the shopper intelligence they have translated in the form of their recommendation engine (“Customers who bought this item also bought…”) available to people on the site. They are on their way to transforming themselves into a Shopping Social Network of sorts, to a certain degree, coming at it not from the Social Network side of the spectrum, but from the shopping side… and it’s picked up quite rapidly.

Things they are still missing: among other things, mainly connecting people with similar “profiles” and “shopping backgrounds”, the way Last.FM does with their “neighbors” concept. Amazon has long offered the concept of “Friends” and “Interesting People”, but it’s people you have to know yourself or find out about, by reading their reviews or comments, rather than folks that Amazon presents to you as close matches for you to get to know. That would be a great tool to make the Social Network come around for shopping, the way I’d envision it, at least in the case of Amazon.com

And how do you see shopping and social networks blending in?