Amazon calls it CloudFront, and it costs $0.17 - $0.22 per GB at the lowest usage tiers. It seems that you simply put your files in an S3 container, make an API call to share them, then let your users enjoy the lower-latency, higher performance service.
Their domestic locations include sites in Virginia, Texas, California, Florida, [...]

Posted November 25, 2008 by Casey
Categories: Dispatches, Technology. Tags: amazon, amazon web services, AWS, CDN, content delivery network. Be the first one.

Via an email from the Amazon Web Services group today:
…we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service.
This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency [...]

Posted September 18, 2008 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: amazon, amazon web services, AWS, CDN, content delivery networks, optimization, performance, website optimization, website performance. Be the first one.

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 [...]

Posted May 9, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: amazon, amazon web services, AWS, commodity service, internet applications, ryan eby, s3, simple storage service. One Comment.

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.

Posted March 28, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: amazon, amazon mechanical turk, amazon's mechanical turk, amazon's mturk, efficiency, hits, human intelligence, human intelligence tasks, management, mechanical turk, mturk, scary future, tasks, time, work, work units. One Comment.

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 [...]

Posted January 27, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: 800 numbers, amazon, contacting amazon, contacting ebay, contacting microsoft, contacting paypal, contacting yahoo!, customer support, customers service, ebay, hard to find 800 numbers, microsoft, paypal, support line, yahoo. 38 Comments.

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 [...]

Posted December 13, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: a9, a9.com, aggregated search, amazon, federated search, libraries, library, library catalog, library catalogs, metasearch, opac, open search, opensearch, search. 4 Comments.

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 [...]

Posted November 30, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, amazon api, amazon web services, api, dublin core, ead, libraries, library, library catalog, marc, marc-xml, opac data, opensearch, web 2.0, web service, web services, web20, webservice, webservices, xml, xml server. 7 Comments.

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 [...]

Posted July 17, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, book search, electronic content, full text content, google, google print, inside books, search engine, search engine watch, search full text, search inside the book. Be the first one.