Science Library Pad

Behold the power of Wikizon: Amazon adds ProductWiki

While you were blinking, Amazon.com added ProductWiki

A list of Wikis you have contributed to appears on your Your Amazon Home and Profile pages.

What Should You Put In A Wiki?

Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read. You should put in relevant factual information that you believe will be of value to others who visit the page. A Wiki is not the place to express your opinion; that's what Customer Reviews and Customer Discussions are for. As always, please treat the Amazon community with respect by not writing inappropriate or off-topic comments.

from http://www.amazon.com/gp/wiki/what-is-this.html

The editing controls are basic: bold, italic, remove formatting, and Wiki link.  I'm not completely sure what "Wiki link" does.

ProductWiki does not show up on all items, and like many "Amazon has added..." features, it doesn't show up on Amazon.ca

I found it on e.g. Son of a Witch: A Novel, on my screen it's right after "Customers who viewed this book also viewed" but who knows what Amazon's customization mindreading does to the page format you may see.

Amazon is also experimenting with Customer Discussions (basically discussion fora, post a message, post a reply kinda thing) and with tagging.

Info via Slashdot Amazon Goes Wiki /.
Wikizon terminology from BusinessWeek Tech Beat blog.

Meanwhile, your OPAC... oh your sad little OPAC, all quiet in the corner.
Don't feel bad.  Remember, your OPAC should never be your user interface anyway.

Amazon does tagging

Alan Taylor and Anil Dash report that Amazon is rolling out tags in a big way. In a discussion board message, Amazonian Blake Scholl announced that 50% of Amazon customers will see the tagging features at this time.

from Read/Write Web: Amazon Does Tagging

Another potentially huge surge in user-entered metadata.
Interesting to ponder how to integrate it.
Do you have your own separate tag cloud for your catalogue?  Do you say, "on Amazon, people tagged this book with..."?  So many folksonomies, so little time...

Amazon.com Prime membership

Amazon.com has cooked up something called Prime.  Appears to be US only, at least I see no mention of it on Amazon.ca  For U$79 you get:

Unlimited Express Shipping

       

• Free Two-Day Shipping on over a million in-stock items
• Overnight Shipping for only $3.99 per item—order as late as 6:30 PM ET

       

Effortless Shopping

       

• No minimum purchase required
• No need to consolidate items to save on shipping

       

Convenient Sharing

       

• Share the benefits of your Amazon Prime membership with up to four family members living in the same household

Amazon gets e-cited about book linking

Open Access News reports "Amazon has started linking to cited books."

very old conference notes

Notes from some other conferences I have attended.

• 13th Annual Canadian Information Technology Security Symposium June 11-15, 2001
• IBM E-Commerce Seminar May 18, 2000
• Wireless Internet for E-Commerce April 28, 2000
• Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2000 April 5-6, 2000