onfocus

Just noticed that Amazon is now allowing comments on each review. It looks like this:


For years, Amazon has tried to keep people from having conversations via reviews with careful instructions about not referencing other reviews. But that didn't stop people from conversing. You often see things like, "Reviewer x is off his rocker..." or "I don't know what some of these reviewers are thinking..." in Amazon reviews. Now people can talk to each other directly.

If people know that their reviews are "thread starters" rather than isolated posts, you could get more chatty reviews with open-ended questions designed to provoke discussion. You should also get more flame wars, more trolling, all of the standard online discussion problems. (Especially with an audience as large as Amazon's.) And how do you police comments on millions of reviews? Does each reviewer "own" the thread associated with the review? If so, shouldn't they be able to approve/edit comments on that review? Is it fair to allow comments on a review from six years ago, when the author of that review isn't expecting feedback, and likely isn't tuning into the page anymore?

On the positive side, you might get a better view of a product because discussion can bring out more detail. Should be interesting.

I'll be in San Francisco next week for The Future of Web Apps conference/summit. Looks like a fun conference with great speakers. And it's always great to be in SF—see (a few of) ya there.

I added a sidebar to the front page here at onfocus that shows the last few albums (with cover art) I've listened to in iTunes. Let's skip why I might want to do this for now, and just jump into the how. People have been doing this since MP3 players have existed, and there are several services that can do this for you now. I send my tracks to Last.fm, and there's My Strands—both of these services have HTML snippets you can add to your site that will show some aspect of what you're listening to. Last.fm is great at putting together charts of tracks and artists, but does nothing with albums. So I had to code my own "now listening" widget to show recent albums. Here's how it works in case anyone out there wants to do something similar: My server has a Perl CGI script called getAlbum.cgi that accepts an artist and album name. Once getAlbum receives an artist and album, it searches for a match on Amazon via their API. If a match is found, it puts a little HTML together with the details, adds the album to a local HTML file: now-hearing.html, and removes the last entry. I include the file in my weblog, and that's what you see in the sidebar. With the server script in place, I just needed a little glue between the server and iTunes. A Windows script called now-playing.vbs checks to see if iTunes is open and playing, and then sends the current artist and album to the server. I set the script to run every 20 minutes with the Windows Task Scheduler. It doesn't grab everything that's playing (especially if I'm shuffling around), but it gets pretty close. I use more than one computer, so I didn't want my Mac to be left behind. I set up an AppleScript that basically does the same thing as the PC script. Instead of using an outside process to run the script at regular intervals, I used the AppleScript idle handler to hit the server every 20 minutes. Then I set the script to open when I log in. If you want to try this setup, you can grab the code:

• getAlbum.cgi
• now-playing.vbs (for Windows)
• now-playing.app (for Mac OS X)

You'll need to edit the scripts a bit so they're pointing to your version of getAlbum.cgi on your server, but that's about it. These scripts are working well for me, and they didn't take very long to put together. And hey, who else is going to play Toots and the Maytals back to back with Ladytron? These types of idiosyncrasies need to be put on display!