Any keyword interesting? I will experiment more with these tools and see if we find interesting information…

I was personally surprised to find Lil Wayne in there But it was from one of the readers music taste…

Let’s look at the Bestsellers electronics page from Amazon.com. 1st on the list is Amazon Kindle, how surprising.

I have no doubt the product is great and receiving very good response. However, I wonder, is it really the number one best selling electronic product on Amazon? Or is this hidden advertising? One might wonder…

Even more interesting is the numbers around the reviews :

• Over 7000 reviews
• Over 45000 people finding the first review helpful!
• Over 5000 people giving it 5 stars

Even the almighty Ipod touch is presenting stats which look ridiculous agains the Kindle. Apple iPod touch

So the question : Has Amazon created a killer product or is there a bit of hidden advertising in there?

Comments are welcome… This article is interesting : http://thekindle.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/kindle-sales-vs-amazons-kindle-marketing-efforts/ regarding the efforts Amazon puts into marketing the Kindle vs the sales.

Here are the searches on each site :

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.fr

Amazon.de

Once again the books are different and do not necessarily adress the same topics. The book on the french Amazon even actually talks about a topic which is not directly related to Palestinians vs Israel (Laïcs contre religieux).

Funny enough, on amazon.com, the War is 100 years : The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War , while on the UK site, the war is only 50 years ! 50-Years-War-Israel … Maybe that’s because it’s on DVD !

I will be looking more at these topics in the future, in particular at how people comment to different books about the same topics and try to find patterns/keywords in the reviews..

However, no matter how global the world is, large services still need to have “local/national” websites.. different cultures, different language, different laws and all other sorts of differences.

One interesting factor is how do these differences affect our global vision?

Let’s take a quick example, I just ran 4 times the same search on amazon, I search for Obama on Amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de

Here are the results from each search :

Amazon.com
Amazon.fr
Amazon.de
Amazon.co.uk

You’ll notice the results are similar, but still quite differents:

 - the first book is not always the same

 - the dates for the same book are different depending on the translation “Dreams from my father” can appear as from 2004 in US but 2008 in Germany

 - the front covers are different

So, how do these factors affect us? Will an american buyer buy different books not only based on his taste but also based on what his shop recommends to him? A recommendation based itself on what people in the same country have bought?

Those are the types of questions I want to adress on this blog… feel free to post comments and discuss!

So what’s this blog all about? Well, in the past few days I got really interested in Web APIs, mashups, etc.. I used to be a programmer but never been very good at web development. However, looking at this, I realised that there is so much data about us as individuals lying on the web. I decided to pick one large source of data and start review it.

My source of data is Amazon. The largest online retailer.. What can our shopping habits tell us? Do we shop differently in different countries? What’s really the must read, must-see, must-have nowadays? Do politics influence our shopping?

All sorts of questions I want to look at … so come on, let’s listen to What the river says…