IP Democracy: Amazon Offers Authors Some Blog Features

At ClickZ News Kevin Newcomb reports that “Amazon.com has launched a program to allow authors to blog on the Amazon.com site.”

“This is a very smart move by Amazon. By asking authors to blog, Amazon is encouraging a dialogue with customers without having to invest any extra effort themselves. It’s the online equivalent of an author book signing,” Andy Beal, president and CEO of search and blog marketing firm Fortune Interactive, told ClickZ News.

So far, the program doesn’t allow readers to comment on blog posts, or to subscribe to blogs via RSS feed. That’s a missed opportunity, according to Beal. “Popular blogs have two things in common: RSS feeds and readers’ comments. If Amazon’s author blogs are to become popular, they need to embrace RSS feeds for each author and allow customers to add comments to posts.”

Another opportunity that Beal thinks Amazon could take advantage of with RSS feeds would be to use a feed to deliver personalized recommendations to users. “Can you imagine how powerful it would be to include personalized RSS ads that read ‘other fans of this author also bought…’ fill in the blank?” he said.

TDavid at makeyougohmm.com says the lack of support for comments and RSS feeds “sure cuts down on the reader interaction. I mean, if it’s just a one-way conversation, how useful is that?

This seems more like a place for book-related announcements than anything else: “I’ll be doing a book signing at ___ on this day/date ___…” Could be worthwhile for authors listed on Amazon to get involved, but “blogging” this is definitely not. At least not from my perspective.

The Amazon pitch focuses on this program being a way to communicate with your readers, increase readership and build a (better?) reader community. I see this as a way for authors to drive traffic to their own blogs/websites, where they are not crippled by having no RSS feed or allowing comments, but I couldn’t really tell if external links will be allowed in the author messages. If those are stripped out, then this really is a roach motel.

Michael Parekh is “glad to see them putting a toe into the blogging waters, but “[doesn’t] think Amazon should stop there.” He cites an earlier post of his that “outlined the merits of the company offering blogging features for it’s customers, targeted especially at the tens of thousands of people that write reviews on every product offered under the Amazon.com sun.”

“What if Amazon announced a feature tomorrow, that offered Harriet (a high-ranked Amazon reviewer), and other tens of thousands of Amazon reviewers, the ability to easily set up a personal blog to the entire web, that automatically logs every review as a blog post? What if it had TypePad like templates to choose from, and blogging features like Categories to set up, with built-in capability for comments, track-backs and the like?”

So why would this be beneficial to Amazon? If there was a system to simultaneously publish content into Amazon as well as an external blog, with no extra effort, I daresay, Amazon would get a heck of a lot of reviewers, which is turn could drive a lot more new and incremental sales…Not to mention that Amazon would be “re-purposing” content at relatively low cost…And, what if…OUTSIDE BLOGGERS…could simultaneously re-publish those reviews into the Amazon system, with RSS links?

And it doesn’t have to stop with the reviewers on Amazon. The company has a whole host of other community types, including Listmania, Discussion Groups, Purchase Circles, etc., and not to mention services like imdb and Alexa that they also own, that could all potentially benefit by being empowered with this simultaneous blogging capability.

Parekh’s comments remind me of a SearchInsider column by Max Kalehoff that I cited in a post earlier today. Kalehoff suggested that “perhaps the most important function of consumer search in the not-too-distant future will be the ability to help navigate the world of user-generated media and consumer opinions.”

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on December 29, 2005 8:53 PM to IP Democracy