28th January 2007, 09:10 pm
Amazon has been adding community-type features to its Web site for a long time, as one can see from its product pages — users can add tags to products, start discussions, and even add information to a product wiki. Now however Amazon is offering a catalog-wide wiki called Amapedia. It’s not called a wiki, but it’s sure what it looks like to me. Amapedia’s in beta at http://amapedia.amazon.com/ . Upon further inspection it looks like an aggregation of all the wiki’d products from the main Amazon Web site.
The front page doesn’t mention “wiki”, it mentions community. And it has an example article and a tag cloud for you to browse through as well as a simple keyword search. Active big tags at the moment include things like camera, fictional character, and strategy game. I did a simple keyword search for licorice, which gave me a list of products from Amazon’s site. None of them had articles. From each item in the search results you could create an article yourself or “watch” for the article. You’ll have to be logged in to be able to watch for the article.
You used to be able to get keyword alerts from Amazon when products matching those keywords became available. It was a lovely idea and then it was pulled. So lemme get this straight. You can get alerts for an article about a product but no longer for a product itself, right? Grrrr…Unfortunately you can’t just do a search for a keyword and then watch that keyword; searches that don’t match a product or article give you only the option to create an article. (My search for tapdancing butterball gave me only the option to create an article. Amusingly, the first real product result for that search was the DVD of Gone With the Wind.)
Back to regular search. A search for Harry Potter brought several results of items that did have articles, both books, video games, and one parody. Though the pages had Amazon product shots and what I’ve come to think of as “Amazon tabs”, every page has both a link to its history and a link to edit. Looks like a wiki to me. Unfortunately most of the articles I looked at just had a tab of product information and a product shot. (The parody article was extensive.)
In addition to the tag cloud searching and the simple keyword search, there’s an advanced search that allows you to do a general search (like DVD or game) and get a series of filters you can apply. For example if you did a search for dvd you might get filters allowing you to narrow down your search to cartoons or TV shows. The Amapedia also has a “random article” function, which I found was the best way to get populated article pages and examples of what people were using Amapedia for (product descriptions and reviews, manuals, and occasionally scholarly discussion of an author/subject.)
Like the watch feature. Like the idea of a wiki for Amazon’s products, but it needs populating!
27th January 2007, 04:02 pm
A little while ago I mentioned a business podcast directory called iBizRadio . It’s been brought to my attention that the same company that runs this resource also has a resource called iBlog Business, a directory of business and corporate bloggers.
iBlog Business seems to have more content than the podcast directory, with a searchable subject index of over 1100 blogs. Subjects linked from the front page include Financial Services, Industrial, and Legal and Law, of course. Categories also have sub-categories. Listings include name and brief description of blogs, and icons for getting the RSS feed, a link to the home page, a link to a detail page with Alexa rating information, and a link to rate the blog.
There’s also a very nice search engine here. I’m told that this directory crawls its included blogs’ feeds once every 24 hours (thus no need for pinging) and the search engine includes the ability to search for blogs, search for posts, or restrict your searches to content from the last 14 days. A search for biodiesel found about 10 results. Unfortunately the search engine doesn’t appear to list results by date, just relevance.
This directory apparently only accepts about 25% of the submissions that it gets — I found the listings for the most part to be pretty good, though occasionally the descriptions didn’t give enough information. You can get lists of new blogs added at http://www.iblogbusiness.com/new/index.html and a list of the most popular blogs at http://www.iblogbusiness.com/popular.html . Aaaaand FAQs for the whole shebang are at http://www.iblogbusiness.com/faq.html .
27th January 2007, 03:07 pm
The Indianapolis Museum of Art has started putting its artwork collection online. And if they were any more hip about it I’d be intimidated — you can browse their collection via a tag cloud and they actually have video clips on YouTube. But there’s some pretty important information missing…
We’ll start with the tag cloud. When you first go to http://www.ima-digital.org/steve/ , you’ll see a cloud of the most popular tags. (There is a login to add your own tags but that’s closed at the moment.) Top tags included Japanese, landscape, and painting, natch. You can also browse a enormous tag cloud if you don’t want to be restricted to a subset.
When you click a tag you’ll get a set of thumbnails — from one to over a dozen. Click on the thumbnail, and you’ll get a larger version of the picture and the words with which it’s tagged. However what you WON’T get is any information about the picture itself — who created it, when, and other information. Where’s that? I’m guessing/hoping that it’s because this collection is in its early stages. Perhaps we’ll see more information later.
The other thing I missed looking at the pictures is how users can distribute them. I mean, if I can browse via a tag cloud why can’t I automatically tag interesting pictures in Del.icio.us? Why can’t I send a picture as an e-card? Again I’m guessing it’s because it’s early for this collection.
If you’re too old-school to browse with tags, you can also browse by set via http://www.ima-digital.org/steve/sets/ . Hint: Click on the name of the set, not on pictures within the set, and you’ll get more results at a time. Also once you’ve finished browsing through the set, refresh the page and you’ll see a different set of pictures. Actually after I was exploring this way I decided I wanted to try just randomly browsing. So I took the URL http://www.ima-digital.org/steve/images/800/ and changed the number at the end. (800 worked but 900 didn’t, so you’ll have to do some experimenting.) Change the number and you’ll get an image page with tags. If the number doesn’t exist you’ll get an empty template page.
Did I mention YouTube? The IMA has a YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/itsmyart . Currently it has a dozen videos ranging from employee profiles to exhibition previews.
You can see an overview of the IMA’s plans in this article at the Indianapolis Star . I liked looking at the pictures and the ability the explore tag clouds was useful (I never know what keywords to use when searching museums.) I can’t wait until picture details are added — I feel like I’m missing a whole dimension of information.
