onfocus

Matt's written up a great Amazon Hack: How to send something not on someone's wishlist to that someone. He used it for a great joke too.

I was trying out Google AdSense ads on a couple pages of this site, but I've removed them because I don't agree with their new draconian terms of service. I used to publish my ad stats so everyone could see how much money I was making from the ads, and that's now prohibited under their terms. (Now that I'm not bound by the terms I can tell you I've made $28.56 to date.) I also don't like that anyone can be barred from the program for secretive, seemingly arbitrary reasons. You also can't mention their terms of service if you're bound by their terms of service. I think that deserves a big collective WTF?.

Google gets just about everything they do right. That's why this behavior is so puzzling. (more at kottke, metafilter, boingboing.)

Anil Dash asked me some great questions and I tried to answer them. You can read me mouthing off about weblogs, journalism, scripting, Amazon Hacks, and where permalinks come from in the first Six Log Interview.

There's a TypePad-specific Amazon Hack (that isn't in the book) on the way...but you should still buy Amazon Hacks to get all of the hacky goodness. ;)

Howard Dean seems to be hopping on the cluetrain with his Net Advisory Net. (The name is almost a recursive acronym like GNU.) The initial roster includes prominent blogospherians Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, and David Weinberger (a Cluetrain author). It's the intellectual property/social software/non-bs dream team. [via boingboing]

Another snapGallery: surreal scenes of Hurricane Isabel at Langley Air Force Base.

The Crazy Signs of Scotland. A quick snapGallery with "Interesting and silly Scottish signs from a North American perspective." (And I thought Canadian signs were confusing!)

Amazon just added a new method to its XML API called TextStreamSearch. This method lets you send an arbitrary bit of text to Amazon, they analyze it for keywords, and then make product recommendations based on that text. This would let you send, say, an entire weblog post and get product recommendations based on that text. I think it could be useful for creating very targeted advertising based on a page's contents. (Sort of like I'm doing on my quotes page.) You could also monitor IM conversations and pop-up product recommendations based on what people are talking about. I haven't tried it yet, and it'll be interesting to see how accurate it is. [via AWS newsletter]

Update: I created a page to test the Text Stream search. You can try it yourself. (There seems to be a limit on the number of characters, but I haven't narrowed it down to exact numbers yet.)

Erik Benson pointed to Joel Spolsky's write-up of his office design. He is building an office like it's 1999, very nice! (Looks like a Monster Office project. ;) It will be interesting to see how the space adapts to use.

Weblogs Inc. No comment. (I need to get me one of those fancy links-only sidebars.)

Badge Swap looks like fun. Heather also put together a beautiful new site for her photographs: hchamp.com.