Over at the Amazon Web Services Blog, they're republishing notes and slides from the Amazon Developer's conference.
BitTorrent, is real video on demand, it scares everyone except the users. NetFlix scares the hell out of Blockbuster. Most independent video stores (and the personalized recommendations) are now gone. In the face of too much choice, you watch the ball. Cricket.
Watch what the customers do, team up with them.
So here's Rael Dornfest, at an Amazon sponsored conference, talking up Amazon's own competition. How likely is it this would happen at an Apple conference? My friends who steal music still buy songs off of iTunes too, because it's often the easiest and fastest way to get the music. The only reason the cable industry hasn't collapsed is a) sports and b) stealing The Daily Show every night is simply not practical except for the über hackers, and it's not going to be anytime soon. So while Apple and Sony are presumably working on the iMovie store, all they have shown us is a bizarre giggle fest last week at MacWorld. Meanwhile, Amazon is bringing passionate users together and brainstorming new features.
And while we're on the topic of "users," I'm shocked at the amount of whining I've read on developers lists about the "nofollow" tag. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collaborated to bring web publishers big and small a trivial way to opt out of having certain links of their sites crawled. It's a simple, elegant solution to a wide array of problems.
The next step is letting users give their own rankings to links, a kind of clue for pagerank. For instance, I would rank links that appear within my posts higher ranking than in my relatively static typelists. Shouldn't I be allowed to give the googlebot some hints? What other kind of value can I communicate with links? It's the Semantic Web, and you're soaking in it.
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