onfocus

Douglas Rushkoff: "In my reality tunnel, the Palestinians and Israelis are basically looking in the mirror. The religions are quite quite similar, and the false notions of state-hood imported from Europe have the people acting out insanely unfounded mythologies of national identity. These people don't have national identities, because nations aren't real." I agree. Now, how do we convince them?

Rael put together some Perl to provide a simple interface to the Amazon recommends system: Amazox. The example on his site is a box with Amazon's current bestsellers...and one for Apple related books best sellers. This code would make it easy to put the top books from any category on your site in your design.

I hope Powells, BookSense, Half.com (all already have affiliates programs), and every other Web bookstore is working on an API. Competition in this area could be good for innovation.

A couple of great links have been contributed in comments here:

About eBay's XML API (and its big time fees for use): eBay API Fees May Impact Sellers' Bottom Line (minimum: $6k setup/certification, then $6.50/1000 calls.) [thanks andrew!]

Another independent example (using Microsoft technology) for working with the new free, yet limited, Amazon XML API at PerfectXML: Amazon.com Associates XML Interface. [thanks allan!] This example also provides more technical detail about the API.

There are more good pieces of the-state-of-APIs puzzle in the comments.

"The street finds its own uses for technology."
- William Gibson, Neuromancer.

And while I'm executing a core dump of menu extensions, here's another one that's fun:

DayPop Links

After installing this, the menu entry "DayPop Links" appears when you right-click on a link. When you choose it, a new window pops-up with the search results for that link at DayPop. (Thanks DayPop!) If you read a lot of weblogs (like me) and you're curious about what others are saying about any given link, this will do it. You know the drill: Win/IE only, this installs it:

DayPop Links Setup
(right-click, Save Target As..., click to install.)

Google It

Here's another browser extension that I've found handy. This one places a context menu entry called "Google It" into the right-click menu for Internet Explorer. You can highlight any text on a page, right-click, choose "Google It", and it brings up a new window with the search results for the text you highlighted. Nothing fancy, but I use it all the time. This script will set it up:

Google It Setup
(right-click, Save Target As..., click to install.)

Once again, Internet Explorer on Windows machines only.

I just found out today that I'm going to be able to attend the Emerging Technology Conference that O'Reilly is putting on. I am stoked—and I don't use that word lightly. Many of the sessions are directly related to things I've been obsessing about; especially web services. I just looked at the schedule, and here are a few that strike me as can't miss:

• Rob's Building Wireless Community Networks (Rob heads up the community wireless group here in Sebastopol and I'm trying to get access at my place. But that's not why I'm mentioning this...honest.)
• Tim O'Reilly talking about The Shape of Things to Come (Hopefully an expansion of his Inventing the Future article.)
• Someone from Google talking about their new API (Might provide some inside scoop...especially their reasoning behind making it public.)
• Though that one is happening the same time as Meg's user-centered Web Services talk that I'm looking forward to.
• Stephen Johnson on Emergence (Need to read his book before I go.)

And for the weblog-related value:

• Dan Gillmore discussing Journalism 3.0
• Dave's Distributed Content Management
• Clay Shirky talking about Blog Lessons

And those are just the sessions I picked out at first glance. As with any conference there is too much going on to see it all, and I'd like to see a public note exchange like we set up for sxsw.

Rambling About APIs

I've been thinking about turning my Amazon scraping scripts into an XML API to their book information (I call these SCRAPIs), but it could never be as reliable as Amazon offering their own API. Plus I'd have to keep up with their page design changes. It's fun to think about rogue APIs to web sites, though.

I wonder when/if eBay will open up an interface to developers. I bet there are thousands of home brewed scripts out there to scrape eBay for auction information. If they had an API, I could see specialized auction sites popping up with their own design...and eBay would always get a cut of the transactions. Perhaps some sites would like to offer auctions, but they don't have the resources to develop their own software, and they don't want to send people to eBay. Yet they have an audience that would be willing to participate. The value in offering an API is extending services to places they can't go today. And in the ideas generated outside of the company...those most interested in the service become the development team. It's sort of like widespread prototyping.

This can be scary for companies. Michael Schrage said, "Prototype-driven innovation ends up promoting a radical deconstruction of existing organizational charts..." In the sense that teams form around prototypes, rather than teams being put together specifically to build them. I think on the outside, through an API, this behavior works to the company's advantage. It attracts people to their technology, it brings people in with fresh ideas, and it discourages politics that have formed around ideas. If you think about an API as widespread prototyping, this interview with Michael Schrage about "shared spaces" has some great ideas; even though he's mostly talking about working within an organization.

Hey, it's Weblog BookWatch Top 10!

I thought it would be interesting to see which books are being mentioned most frequently on weblogs. Weblog BookWatch keeps track of weblogs that flow through the recently changed list at weblogs.com and searches for links to Amazon.com. Then it looks at the ISBN in the link's URL, and counts the link as a mention of that book. The most fequently mentioned books show up on the Top 10 list, with references to the weblogs that mentioned them. It's only looking for books right now (not CDs or other products), and only looking for links to Amazon.com.

Update: To answer Jason's question, yes I'm scraping Amazon to get the book information. They don't offer it through their API yet.

Thanks to weblogs.com for the great service (and for offering their list in XML). And to Amazon.com for the book info.

similarly, Google released their API—ya know, in case you hadn't heard. It feels like the Web is taking its next step. (Or maybe it's just the big sites catching up.)

Amazon is offering an XML Platform for developers so they can integrate Amazon's best-sellers into their websites. If you're an associate, log into the associate site for more info. This is an interesting step toward Amazon becoming a Web Service. They're ahead of the curve, and really understand how the Web works. I can't wait to see how they expand this.

An independent developer has already written a Perl module called Business::Associates that works with the new platform.