Posts tagged as: amazon
Blodget Blogging
Posted on Monday, January 16, 2006
at 3:09 PM (permalink)
It used to be that people in need of refashioning themselves after a crash would enter rehab and/or appear on Oprah. Now they start a blog. My favorite example is Henry Blodget, whose InternetOutsider blog is fascinating reading. The irony of the blog's title is heightened by such posts as $500. $600. $2,000. Do I Hear $10,000? $0?, in which he makes the bear case for Google. For those who spent the late Nineties under a rock, Blodget was the poster boy (what a great cliche) for the Dot-Com stock craze, when he was a stock analyst for Merrill Lynch. His most famous call was a $400 price target for Amazon. Now that he is coming back after being knocked out of the game, his writing has a humility and gentleness that is refreshing. Definitely aggregator worthy.
Sometimes it gets a little scary
Posted on Sunday, November 27, 2005
at 10:06 AM (permalink)
I may have felt amused and a little titlated by the possibilities of the Amazon A9 street cams, but then I realized that Amazon also has Turkers working for them. Now I feel a little creeped out. So there is an autonomous economic model in place that says if enough people ask Big Search to see something, eventually people will be paid microcents somewhere in the world to take a picture of it and feed it back to Big Search. ... So what happens if Big Search starts asking people to "do things" to retrieve this information? Talk about a global Heisenberg principle. We will be changing the world just by looking at it.
Big Search needs to be fed
Posted on Sunday, November 27, 2005
at 9:31 AM (permalink)
 Orwell was about 20 years too late and too focused on politics instead of economics. The drive of Big Search is to "always be growing content," so we can expect more complete coverage and more closer-to-realtime coverage in the future. Amazon's maps now have street by street photographic coverage of many cities. Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country. Unfortunately, the image defaults to the side of the street with Starbucks. You'll have to click the film strip for the opposite side of Church Street. (via Robert Scoble)
Web 2.0 goes mainstream fast
Posted on Wednesday, November 23, 2005
at 6:50 AM (permalink)
Man, I'm getting co-opted before I have any opt to co. I knew this Web 2.0 stuff was fun and cool, but it looks like the powers that be get it a little too quickly. The Washington Post now has its own tag cloud connected to an RSS aggregator style feed of their own RSS feeds. They are sitting outside their own site and reading and displaying the content in new ways. That is so Web 2.0.
And in a related story, Amazon now has a product Wiki. So in the past 2 weeks Amazon has started discussion fora, user tagging, and wikis to their product pages. Could they be a little crazed abut collecting user content?
Turkers of the World Unite!
Posted on Tuesday, November 22, 2005
at 9:22 PM (permalink)
Experienced Turkers (people who perform work on Mechanical Turk) get together to talk shop and swap pictures.
Amazon tags
Posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2005
at 6:45 AM (permalink)
Amazon has been aware of the benefits of turning their customers into a community for years, and they have now adopted tags as the latest incarnation of that process. (via Techcrunch.)
My first Amazon API program
Posted on Sunday, November 13, 2005
at 8:01 PM (permalink)
I now have a very simple program that queries the Amazon API for books on Ruby programming and displays the results as a list of titles linked to their product pages. The most interesting part wasn't the coding, which is pretty simple, but the incredible depth of Amazon's API. They make it possible to build a complete e-commerce site built on their engine. I now understand why Jeff Bezos was quoted on a financial program as saying that Amazon may eventually become a e-commerce systems provider instead of a retailer. You can learn a lot about a company's plans by studying the functionality they surface in their API. Even if I don't end up building a real product with anyone's API, I will get a better understanding of their strategy.
Reading Amazon RSS with Ruby
Posted on Saturday, November 12, 2005
at 4:21 PM (permalink)
I'm having a ball with my Ruby project. I had the usual start-up issues, but once I found a webhost that knew what it was doing, and ironed out a few bugs in the database library for MySQL, things have gone great. I now have a simple script that will read the current Amazon RSS feed for computer books, and publish it as a list of linked titles on a web page. Now I'm ready to sign up for an Amazon API account and get started with web services programming.
Ruby.Darwinianweb is working
Posted on Saturday, November 5, 2005
at 7:47 PM (permalink)
I think I've got everything working on ruby.darwinianweb.com at a pretty basic level. I wrote a simple Ruby script to retrieve an Amazon page with HTTP, just to get my feet wet. Considering the amount of time I've been working with it, Ruby looks like it will be a lot of fun. I've hardly been stuck at all during this process.
I think having a separate site to write about my experiments with Ruby is a good idea, because it will allow me to geek out there without turning this into a pure programming blog. The main Darwinianweb.com site will stay focused on my reactions to new events and technologies on the Internet. The only weird thing will be posting my code as I learn the language. In the past when I wrote about programming I always waited until I was proficient in the language before publishing my work. That way I could go back and fix any newbie mistakes I made early on. This new style of code blogging will take some getting used to.
Amazon adds discussion forums
Posted on Saturday, November 5, 2005
at 9:39 AM (permalink)
In checking the Amazon link for the Ajax book I discovered that Amazon has apparently added discussion forums to all of their book pages. Talk about "marketing being a conversation." I already viewed the reviews as the most useful part of Amazon. I never make a serious purchase without checking Amazon's user reviews, even if I don't plan on buying from Amazon. A quick check of other categories only shows the discussion forums on books, but I'm sure they will spread through the site. Amazon was an early pioneer in user generated content, and this is a great next step.
Making progress on Ruby project
Posted on Saturday, November 5, 2005
at 8:18 AM (permalink)
I started writing a framework for my Ruby test site yesterday. All I need right now is a set of simple functions to display the source code of the programs I'm writing, and to execute them and display the results within a standard page format for the site. As is common with OOP languages, I'm just using the existing classes in a procedural manner for now. Once I start building up a larger codebase and have to deal with reuse issues, I will build some classes of my own. So far I'm finding Ruby to be a pleasant language to work with for what is now just text manipulation. The syntax stays out of your way, and it is extremely dynamic. So I can have code that constructs the test code I want to execute and then evaluates it and returns the result as a string. In this way it is reminiscient of the dBASE language, which is great for the "make it up as you go along" style I prefer. Today I hope to start building queries for Amazon in Ruby. I'll have more to say about that in later posts.
Multiple bodies colliding with their heads cut off
Posted on Friday, November 4, 2005
at 7:51 AM (permalink)
Ah, for the simple days when it was just Netscape with a browser causing the fuss, and all Microsoft had to do was suck out all their air with IE to kill them. Today, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo all competing to do EVERYTHING anyone could ever want (even that is questionable) with a computer, it is almost impossible to tell where the leading edge is leading to. I guess the computer industry expanding in all directions at the same time is the definition of a bubble. The real reason why bubbles form and then expand to extremes is that there is no chance for customer feedback. The Web 1.0 bubble was funded by VC money chasing markets without any time to see if there was any money to be made. Web 2.0 is expanding because the Big Four are locked in a steel cage deathmatch and don't have time to see if any of their new projects in beta will find a positive response from the market. By market I mean actual users in the millions, not just tens of thousands of bloggers.
Web sweatshops are not too far off
Posted on Thursday, November 3, 2005
at 10:23 PM (permalink)
A friend of mine has been talking about harnessing labor in third-world countries as a cheaper form of "artificial intelligence" for years. Instead of writing code to perform cognitive tasks, it would be cheaper to give computers and net connections to thousands of people and let them "automate" tasks that are better done by a human mind. It looks like Amazon has finally done just that. They have launched a beta of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allows humans to complete cognitive tasks at low-cost, piecework prices. I could try to describe this, but you have to see it to believe it. (via Google Blogscoped)
I spoke too soon
Posted on Wednesday, November 2, 2005
at 12:02 PM (permalink)
Well, I had a fun time with Textdrive.com. After their tech support didn't respond for 24 hours about my inability to run any scripts, I tried their "support" forum. The moderator told me that if I couldn't get a script to run I shouldn't be using their service, so I took his advice. Now I'm trying A2hosting.com. I have Ruby and Apache running on my own machine, so I'll just start with the Amazon stuff locally. I'll let you know when I also have it running online.
Time to start Ruby programming
Posted on Tuesday, November 1, 2005
at 9:15 AM (permalink)
I've been reading Ruby books for a week now and I'm getting antsy to do some coding. My way of learning a language is to pick a real target and then push my way through all the obstacles. That forces me to do the hard tasks, but keeps me from wasting time on features I'll never need. I know I've been saying that I want to use Ruby to run the CMS for this blog, but I want to hold off on that until I add enough features. For example, I still need to add calls to ping servers and tagging to this blog. It will be easier to just do that in FoxPro first, and not worry about the programming language at the same time. Besides, from everything I've seen, Ruby on Rails will be the best way to build a CMS with Ruby, so I'll wait until later to start that project. I'll pick an easier target for my first Ruby project.
I've had an idea for Amazon web service programming for a while that might make a good candidate. I'd like to build a "pick the best book on a subject" app. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but the general idea would be to enter a search term and have the app rank available books based on a set of criteria I develop. That will let me explore the Amazon database from the inside.
My first step will be to build a development environment. I could start by doing Ruby programming on my own computer, but that won't let you look over my shoulder easily. I could do the Ruby project on the server where this blog is hosted, but that brings up the security issue. Programming on the web in a new language always leaves open the possibility of security holes. I'd rather do my quick and dirty development in a separate location and then move them to a new server for production use. I also like the idea of a distributed environment for web development. It allows for better scaling and gives me more control later for rearranging the architecture. So my first task will be to build ruby.darwinianweb.com at a new host.
When I first started looking at Ruby I saw that there were some hosting sites that provided Ruby and Ruby on Rails installations at extremely low rates. They billed themselves as Ruby playgrounds, which is a great idea. I've been a programming language junkie for over 25 years, and the idea of playing with a new language is always a thrill. It looks like these hosts are aimed directly at that market.
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