Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Are you an Amazon Associate?. I'd noticed that my Amazon Associate fees this quarter were much lower than average. Then I notices that I wasn't getting any referral fees for some items readers emailed to say they'd purchased. Jason dig some digging and discovered that Amazon's URLs have changed. Apparently only one style of URL results in Associates fees. If you're using an Associates code on your site, be sure to read his post and double-check your URLs. [megnut] 5:25:57 PM

Here is a site that has an Amazon book link built right in!  And some interesting content. 5:18:15 PM

Interesting concept applications are a bit fluffy - maybe stock market day trading...?  How bout discovering that the great mass of people were suddenly typing Columbia or NASA after the recent shuttle disaster... Blog Bursts?. Word 'Bursts' May Reveal Online Trends "Searching for sudden 'bursts' in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently, says a US computer scientist. Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents. While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg's approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases. Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze.... Researchers at Google, the world's most widely used internet search engine, have already shown that identifying spikes in search terms can be used to track the spread of news and rumours around the world. The algorithms that run Google's automated news aggregation service remain secret, but it is not difficult to imagine that word bursts could, or do, have a useful role." [New Scientist] What an interesting idea in light of Google's recent purchase.... [The Shifted Librarian] 12:55:08 PM

For future reference - Medscape RSS Feeds for different specialties... Medscape RSS. Medscape Makes RSS Feeds Available!. Medscape Jumps into RSS "I am really happy to announce that Medscape, the leading news, information, research and CME site for Physicians on the Internet has joined the RSS revolution. We are now publishing RSS feeds of our headlines in each specialty for which we have a home page. And if you really want the full picture of what's going on in medicine, you can subscribe to a full site feed that syndicates just about every article, news story and CME program that is published. This is a direct result of my experiments here in weblogs, as well as interactions I've had with the 'Doc Bloggers' in the column to the right. Admittedly, we are one of the few sites that rely on getting people to look at our content on our site launching this feature (and outside of technology-oriented sites, you can probably count the major media participants on one hand), and are certainly the first serious medical resource to do so. So why aren't we afraid that publishing an RSS feed will actually lead to less traffic on our site? It comes down to this...we believe in the quality of our content. We know there is nowhere else on the Internet where you can get the same timeliness, focus and professional quality of medical information. If you are a doctor (or you are interested in medical information), our RSS feed is the best way to stay up to date on what we are publishing, and you will invariably want to visit our site to see the whole story." [Tales of Hoffman] Add Mescape to the "ClueTrained-In" column! Remember - RSS doesn't have to be a supplement for site visitors; it can easily be a complementary channel. Congratulations to Steve and Medscape for taking the long view! I truly believe this will benefit them in the long run, and I hope Steve will be able to provide us with periodic updates. [The Shifted Librarian] This is important for a number of reasons not least of which, from my perspective, is that in the medical professional we have a group of people for whom the classification of knowledge feeds isn't going to be a nice-to-have but a must-have. These people are going to have so much information pushed at them that it is going to be essential that they can intelligently organise the streams into useful knowledge bases. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 12:39:51 PM

© Copyright 2005 W R Carlson.