Dave

Amazon launches Amapedia

Amazon have launched a new site, Amapedia, which is a wiki for products. Nice idea.

Effectively, it gives people a chance to write about the stuff they like which can be bought from Amazon. I guess that means writing about stuff you hate is possible too. What makes the whole site extra cool is the use of tags to help you find related stuff

The guys at Read/WriteWeb have it summed up pretty well:

The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new. But a wikipedia for products makes perfect sense for Amazon. Who better to spotlight products and gather product information from the community, than Amazon? Another way to look at this: Amapedia could become the next generation of user reviews. User reviews on websites today are relatively rigid and old fashioned, so Amazon may be thinking that Amapedia will be a new platform for user reviews – it may help remove redundancy in reviews, while offering more completeness.

Technorati Tags: , ,

If British politics is bad…

…then imagine how bad things are in the states. From The Guardian:

The Democratic senator, Barack Obama, has launched an aggressive
counter-attack against rumours that he is a Muslim and was educated at
a madrasa in Indonesia…Mr Obama’s spokesman said the senator had never been a Muslim and was a
church-going Christian. “We won’t take allegations that are patently
untrue lying down,” Robert Gibbs said in a statement…

But rumours that would ordinarily have remained in the blogosphere
gained some credibility this month when an online magazine said Hillary
Clinton’s campaign was investigating Mr Obama’s Muslim heritage. Ms
Clinton’s campaign has condemned the story as an attack on both
Democratic leaders.

How thoroughly depressing.

Need a Web 2.0 Name?

The Web 2.0 Company Name Generator is a cool and amusing little site. As the site says:

Need a name for your Web 2.0 company? Try this handy name generator.

Here’s some that I got:

Zoomworks
Buzzfish
Flashdog
Thoughttune
Quambee
Flashcat
Npath
Skamba
Chatterpulse
Quimia

That last one is just filthy.
Anyhow, once you have your name, don’t forget to head over to ImageTool.NET to sort out your Web 2.0 logo…

[tags]web 2.0, names, logo[/tags]

Link posts

Since the death of the previous blog, I cancelled the regular posting of my daily del.icio.us links.

When I set it up I thought it would be an interesting reminder for me of the stuff I thought was worth reading, and some bits might be useful for those that read this site. I was conscious, though, that a lot of the time those posts came up one after the other as original content is a little hard to come by sometimes.

So, what do we think? Should I bring them back? Or would a discreet link to my del.icio.us page on the sidebar be sufficient?

[tags]del.icio.us[/tags]

LGSearch Stats

Google’s Coop cusomised search engine now provides usage statistics. This is undoubtably a Good Thing.

My customised search engine is LGSearch, one which searches local government websites. Sounds dull, but when you work for in local government, it’s useful. Obviously others think so too.

chart thumbnail

As well as the basic numbers, it also lets you know what the top searches have been:

LGSearch searches

Interesting stuff, and a great feature.

[tags]google coop, lgsearch[/tags]

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