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 at 8:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Barb at thesocialsoftwareweblog picks up on a dustup between MySpace (now owned by News Corp.) and YouTube. It seems that the former was blocking its users from accessing embedded and linked YouTube videos.
According to this post at the YouTube blog, the situation has been resolved and was a “simple misunderstanding.”
But Salvor, a user of both services from Reykjavik, Iceland, sees something more sinister at work. Below is an excerpt from one of Salvor’s posts, which claims that blog content as well as video content was temporarily blocked by MySpace. Salvor’s earlier comments on the episode can be found here and here.
Myspace tried to censor words in blogs - words that somehow interferred with their business interests. I guess the people running Myspace have discovered how extremely bad publicity this censoring was for one of the most popular social networks in the world and I guess part of the deal with Youtube is a hush-up pretending this did not happen.
But it did. And it changed my vision of the world that I live in. Forever. There is no difference in censorship in China when the authorities censor out words like “democracy” and “freedom of expression” and when a capitalist market oriented social networking company censor out words referring to services they do not want their users to have access to.
I guess Youtube has too much at stake not to be friends with Myspace. Therefore all critics and documentation of this censorship has disappeared from their blog. But being one of the Myspace users who got censored I am still angry and feel like the on-line world that I believed in has fallen apart. Especially when the people at Myspace yesterday blocked access to my blog and blocked me so I could not access to my account - presumably because it was critical of Myspace censoring tactics and over 900 people had viewed that post - just in a matter of few hours.
Our only hope is that all the major channels for telling stories or shouting out to the world that something is rotten in the state of Denmark are not controlled by the same company. Think about a world in the future where flickr, myspace, delicio.us, google and technorati and digg are all synchronized and filter out and block information that the ruling class do not want the public to have.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:23 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Starting on New Year’s Eve, AT&T (formerly SBC) will kick off a new branding campaign to reposition the combined company into a new powerhouse in the communications world. The effort, led by GSD&M in Austin, TX, gets some play in this New York Times piece and this Austin American Statesman article (registration required).
The campaign will lean heavily on the new globe logo (looks a lot like the old globe logo — click on thumbnail) and the tag line “Your World. Delivered.” Buildings in Time Square will be wrapped with ads for AT&T, and TV spots (AT&T has produced four new commercials) will run on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” and “New Year’s Eve Live” with Regis Philbin on Fox. Print campaigns will roll out, including a full page ad in the New York Times Magazine that is a crossword puzzle with answers related to AT&T.
Some folks think SBC should have retained its name, or at least come up with a new one like Verizon did. AT&T is such a weird amalgam of concepts — Ma Bell, monopolist, long distance company, wireless provider — that it’s going to be hard to unify consumers into a new positive perception. But clearly the company is pulling out all the stops to do just that.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:02 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The latest survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms what parents of adolescent girls already know: young women are embracing the Internet at a higher rate than young men. The report “How Women and Men Use the Internet” says that 86% of women ages 18 to 29 are online, compared with 80% of men in the same age group.
The disparity is even greater among African Americans — 60% of young women are online, compared with 50% of young men. Still, because the older age groups tilt toward men, men edge out women in Internet usage — 68% of all men compared to 66% of all women.
And of course, what the two sexes do online is quite different. Men search out entertainment (ahem) and information, while women seek to connect with others through email.
Women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role email plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships.
One interesting finding that contradicts this traditional view of women, and not highlighted in the report’s summary: men use IM more than women, by a ratio of 42% to 39%. That may not be statistically significant, but given the role that IM plays in maintaining social and business relationships, you’d think that women would far outpace men on this measure.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:30 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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