onfocus

Headed to bc. I'll be back in a week or so. Watch for mophos.

Now this is some sort of situationist street theater happening in Portland today. I guess it's a version of a flashmob where people not only gather spontaneously, but they perform choreographed actions. [via strangechord] If you had a flashmob at your disposal, what sort of situations would you invent?

After my post about OregonLive.com last week, I had to laugh when I saw this headline in OJR: Newspaper Web Sites Struggle to Attract Younger Readers. Maybe they're just getting skewed demographic data. ;)

In all fairness though, they even give OregonLive.com as a good example of attracting younger readers. Online Editor Cosgrove said part of their secret is that they've recruited community members to cover high school sports events: "'These volunteer reporters are students, parents, the lady who sells hot dogs, and even one guy who's a local councilman,' Cosgrove said. 'It's a real cross section of the community.'"

Now if they would just give all of these people their own customizable weblogs, they could cover even more aspects of their communities year round. Then the paper could highlight the best reporting.

Some great Amazon features aren't available through their Web Services interface (AWS) yet. Because the Amazon RSS feeds rely on AWS data, you can only create feeds of available info. Granted, the data includes all of their millions of products across thousands of categories, but there's still some great info waiting to be exposed. Anil mentioned that he wanted his gold box as RSS. And here's my Wish List for additions to AWS that would make good feeds:

• Movie showtimes (especially for my Zip Code)
• Purchase Circle product lists (especially for my city)
• The latest music downloads available
• Early Adopters (Amazon's Gizmodo)
• Movers & Shakers (Amazon's Zeitgeist)
• The latest Listmania! lists and How-Tos (with filters)

In Amazon Hacks, I show how you can access some of this data programmatically with screen scraping. It would be much more stable through AWS, though.

When you think about AWS data as RSS, it puts a new spin on how the info can be used, and what features should be available as XML. What RSS feeds would you like to see?

I'm currently reading an excellent book called How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. In it he considers the ways buildings evolve over time, changing in ways architects don't anticipate, and draws conclusions about how architecture must change to address this evolution. Brand argues for a more user-centered architecture that cares how a building's occupants will use the space for years to come. It sounds obvious, but studies about how people actually use a building are rarely done—and architecture awards are given based on photographs, not interviews with a building's inhabitants. It's timely reading for me because we've been looking at houses to buy in Corvallis, and this book is changing the way I think about buildings. It's also changing the way I think about Web development.

I'd like to see someone put together a similar study called How Applications Learn. Using Brand's book as a template, I bet you could take many of his theories and see if they apply to application development. Showing screenshots of the first version of Word—and each version leading up to the latest Word—would be like showing a house with floors, rooms, and inexplicable hallways added over the years. If cathedrals are "High Road" development and warehouses "Low Road" (as Brand labels them), there must be application equivalents. What are the 70's domes of coding? Are some applications considered an "investment" while not actually solving a real-world problem? How does the structure of MMORPGs limit or embrace the ways their players can add to the environment? Which programs are truly complex and which are "decorated sheds"? User-research is often done early in the design process, but what are some methods for ensuring user-centered design well into the life of the application after features are added where needed?

There wouldn't be as much history and tradition to draw on for How Applications Learn, but it's never too early to think about how time affects our virtual structures.

A conversation from around the house earlier this week...

pb: (excited!) did you see the latest post on my site?
shawnde: Does it have anything to do with Amazon?
pb: yeah!
shawnde: (rolls eyes.)

Daschle will post diary on his Senate Web site: "'My staff told me a while back about a blog,' Daschle said. 'I learned a new word. ... This new blog concept appealed to me.'" [via mkelley + blogpopuli]

Several people have mentioned that it would be nice to show the newest products in the Amazon RSS feeds rather than the top-selling products. There's a quick hack to make this happen. Build a feed with the Amazon RSS Feed Builder like normal, click "get feed", and note the local onfocus.com URL for the resulting page in your browser's address bar. The last bit of the URL should be %2Bsalesrank. Highlight this text, change it to +daterank, and hit enter. When the page reloads, you'll have your RSS feed URL sorted by product release date.

Note that the RSS feed description will still say "Up-to-date listings of Amazon.com's top items (by Sales Rank)", even though it's sorted by date. This is a function of Amazon's stylesheet that's transforming the AWS response—this phrase is hard-coded.

Kinda kludgy, but it works! I set up some feeds to watch for new books by publishers I like. I'll see if I can work sorting choices into the interface when I get some time.

I didn't sign up for this. FTLOG, I had no idea Oregon would be this hot consistently. Luckily it looks like it's going to cool back down to the 80s in few days.

More Amazon news: According to the Seattle paper it turns out Ted was not a PR-experiment fiction, but is a real life person. The only question that remains is why they yanked the plug on his blog so abruptly.

Amazon didn't really let people know how to add feeds to their newsreader so I whipped up a page that can get you started: Amazon RSS Feed Builder. You can build Book, DVD, or CD feeds with this little tool. Just choose a category or enter a keyword and you'll get the URL for the feed. Then you can copy the feed URL and paste it into your newsreader. If the RSS looks good (ie. has items), you should also get a preview of the feed so you can see what's in it. The feed builder hasn't been tested too much so let me know if you run into problems.

Here are some RSS feed URLs I built with this tool (that I'll be monitoring):

• Top Computers/Internet Books
• O'Reilly Hacks Series
• Top Documentary DVDs
• Top Electronic Music
• Top Bargain Books

Try it out: Amazon RSS Feed Builder.

Update: The feed preview is a bit sketchy—so even if it says there aren't any items, check the feed manually to see if that's true.

Matt notes that Amazon has embraced RSS syndication of its catalog. Matt also posted an example feed that lists books about weblogs. This is a great illustration of why Web Services are important.

Speed is key

To implement this new feature in the world before they had Web Services, a company like Amazon would have to focus some developers on putting together the RSS. This would involve special code to get the results from their database and "hard coding" those results as RSS. Any change in use would probably require new code, more developer time, etc. In the world with Amazon Web Services (AWS) though, they already have output in an XML format and a mechanism for transforming that XML (XSLT). All they needed to do to implement this feature was write a stylesheet to transform AWS responses into RSS. Instead of writing new code to accomplish a specific task, they can simply write a new stylesheet to fit their new task. And the stylesheet will work for almost all of the AWS methods available (Author Search, Director Search, Keyword Search, Category Listing [aka. Browse Node]...on and on). With a single stylesheet they've opened up their catalog to the thousands of people using RSS newsreaders.

So, how does it work? Check out the monster URL for the sample feed Matt posted:

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20&dev-t=amznRss&KeywordSearch=weblog&mode=books&bcm=&type=lite&page=1&ct=text/xml&sort=+salesrank&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl

The URL is just a standard public AWS query with a slight change. Instead of the normal f=xml in the URL, it's f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl. This tells AWS to use Amazon's RSS stylesheet to transform the results before sending them back. And once you see that it's using their standard AWS queries, you can use that to your advantage.

What's in it for me?

If you want to offer specific Amazon product feeds, and you want to get a kickback (ok, affiliate fee) when someone clicks the link through their newsreader and buys a product—just tweak this URL. Change t=webservices-20 to t=[your associates tag] and dev-t=amznRss to dev-t=[your developer key]. That's it! Nothing to install on your server, no code to write. The only work you have to do is encouraging people to add your URL with your variables to their newsreader. This economic incentive is how Amazon encourages people to use their system, and I'm amazed more companies aren't doing it.

As Matt pointed out, Amazon will make money with RSS. And thanks to their open platform—there's no reason you can't make some money too.