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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Amazon at Christmas

Well, after our biggest Amazon Christmas yet (there's been a delivery every day for the last week thanks to Amazon Prime) the time is finally up and the last package has arrived - we can't get anything else delivered before Christmas now. While the rest of the retailers in the UK are whining about how much people are spending, I have a hunch Amazon will be quietly smiling. Especially since gift vouchers remain instantly available for forgotten gifts...

Labels: Amazon

posted at 12:32 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Moncef Genoud on Amazon

I'm sitting in my splendid room at Keystone listening to Moncef Genoud's brilliant Aqua and idly web surfing. I notice that Amazon MP3 (US only for now sadly) happens to have the album available for DRM-free MP3 download. I have a blazing log fire going, the view out over the mountains is tremendous, and I've been able to take more great animal photos. Another excellent visit to Colorado Software Summit!

Labels: Amazon, Music, travel

posted at 2:27 AM (UK) | Comment? (1 so far) | links to this post | |

More Feist

Still enjoying using Amazon MP3 (you'll need to use a US delivery address to buy stuff). Today I finally got round to buying Leslie Feist's The Reminder. I'm not sure that the single, 1234, is the best track on the album. It all sounds rather like Let It Die (try Secret Heart or Mushaboom), which in my view is a good thing, but if you're trying her out for the first time you'll only want one of those albums.

Labels: Amazon, Music

posted at 12:29 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Amazon to Apple: Stop the Lock-In

The war has started between the two As - Apple and Amazon. I just gave Amazon MP3 a try and it works splendidly.

They are selling current chart music in the US at 89¢ per track (cheaper albums too), and delivering it directly into iTunes in MP3 format. And just to add insult to injury, they let me test the service with a free track from "The Apples in Stereo", as if to ask why iTMS is still in mono and offering less for more.

A very welcome challenge timed just around the point when lots of us are asking whether Apple has turned out to me one of the bad guys instead of just exploiting them. Let's hope it's the competitive force that finally wipes out DRM.

Labels: Amazon, iTunes, Music

posted at 3:42 PM (UK) | Comment? (2 so far) | links to this post | |

Amazon Is Parochial

I find Amazon something of a paradox. They have some very innovative thinking in their retail business, and I find the "associates" scheme very effective (I am now using their AStore to manage three of my interests lists, on photography, books and music). Yet they have an amazing blind spot when it comes to geography.

The problem is this; the Associates schemes for each country are distinct. They have stores in many different countries and they expect me to maintain totally separate accounts on each of them. I could live with that, but it gets worse. To earn credit for a sale delivered in a country, I have to have an account in that country and I have to use the unique ID for that country in the referral. To do that, I would have to know which country the reader resides in. Amazon provides no assistance in doing this. The result is that, in the case of AStore, I need to have completely separate stores for each country. I don't bother, the return on the effort isn't worth it since my primary motivation is actually having a simple CMS rather than driving revenue anyway.

How can such an advanced company have such a huge blind-spot when it comes to the international nature of the Internet? I have readers in every country where Amazon does business, and from one page I could be gathering attention for their products in all those countries. As it is, they pretty much force me to focus just on the readers in the UK and the US. How myopic and reactionary. Come on, Amazon, get with the Web on this one.

Labels: Amazon, Books, Music, website

posted at 1:56 PM (UK) | Comment? (3 so far) | links to this post | |

New Booklist for a New Year

I decided that my old book-list page on Webmink was looking a bit freyed around the edges, so I have been meaning to rework it for some time. The problem is that editing HTML takes a repeated investment in time. That's the reason I use an aggregator to build my home page - it simply gathers the work I've already done elsewhere automatically rather than requiring an additional process step.

This, by the way, is the reason most club, small business and church web sites fail - because people don't factor in the effort involved in working regularly to keep things fresh. All they look at is the up-front effort and cost, cover that and then fail to budget for upkeep. It's also the reason gathering metrics for driving quality improvement in an organisation fails if the data-gathering is an additional process step. If you need a metric, measure something people have to do in order to achieve the goal, don't ask them to fill in an extra form or visit an extra web site because when the going gets tough they just won't.

This is all by way of saying that I may have found the perfect tool in Amazon AStore. You'll remember I have been using it to document my camera system - well, I think it may be the perfect mechanism for creating an attractive and useful book list as well. Take a look and let me know what you think of that and the new music list, both with comments of the length I use on del.icio.us for links.

Labels: Amazon, Books, Music

posted at 7:42 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

A-mazing

I set up an Amazon AStore in the Autumn just to see what was involved and thought nothing more of it. I linked to it from my home page (see the Cameras link on the left) and it seems people have been clicking it.

Lots of people. I just found there was over $170 in commissions waiting from the last quarter, on $4000 of sales. Now, compared with Guy Kawasaki's AdSense income that's pennies, but it's more than paid for my web hosting, so thank-you to all of you who clicked through to Amazon that way!

Labels: Amazon, website

posted at 1:25 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |