Amazon’s Simple Storage Service

May 9, 2006 – 12:08 pm

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories.
I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to servers [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)



…And A Mechanical Turk To Rule Them All

March 28, 2006 – 12:04 pm

Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon's Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I’d be foolish not to.

Foolish not to, but who wants to work at the behest of a computer? And that’s Paul’s complaint.

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

When You Need To Talk To Customer Support

January 27, 2006 – 12:22 pm

It’s good to know Hard to Find 800 Numbers.com is there when you need it. Here are the top five:

 
HTF#
Who
Notes

Amazon.com
800-201-7575
877-251-0696
866-348-2492
206-266-2992
Cust. service
Seller support [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (32)

OpenSearch Spec Updated

December 13, 2005 – 12:39 pm

I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:
We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…
OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (4)

OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services

November 30, 2005 – 3:25 pm

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.
Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (6)



Full-Text Searching Inside Books

July 17, 2005 – 7:40 pm

Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.
The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.
Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)