I posted the other day about not being able to see this new Amazon ProductWiki that everyone is posting about … and apparently there is an explanation. The nice people at Church of the Customer replied to my post and have posted an explanation on their own blog.
In short this new ProductWiki is in a beta stage where it can only be viewed on some computers … not mine apparently, but I was able to see it on my husband's. Pretty nifty idea, I can't wait to see it work for everyone.
In my hunt for the new Amazon product wiki I found 3 new features I didn't know about.
First, I found this on Harry Potter Book 5. It lists the books that cite the title you're looking at … pretty nifty … and potentially handy if you're looking at a scholarly title.
Tags??? Tags are everywhere now. This I found on every title I looked at (see the Harry Potter example) … no explanation needed.
The last new thing I found was Customer Discussions/Forums. This one was on one of the bestsellers I clicked on to find the wiki – The Lighthouse. It looks like the precusor to the wiki …
It looks like everyone is jumping on the communication & collaboration bandwagon, it's all pretty neat, but it makes for very cluttered product pages … I'm interested to see how all of these additions are organized in the future.
I see a bunch of posts about a new product wiki from Amazon, but no one links to examples … and out of the 20 different products I looked at I could find nothing resembling the only screenshot I could find. Are we all gullible? Did one person post about this and we all just believe it? Has anyone else found an actual product with this wiki attached?
This leads me rant #2 of today. I really do not like it when someone posts about a new feature but doesn't link to an example for the reader … yesterday I spent a bunch of time trying to see the new Froogle Map, but I didn't know how to make it pop up … this would have been solved if someone posted something like Dan did today with an example.
I'm off to hunt for an actual example of this new Product Wiki … if it exists.
It looks like the Library of Congress is jumping on the digitization bandwagon. Even more interesting, Google has donated $3 million in funding for the project.
Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin said, “Google supports the World Digital Library because we share a common mission of making the world's information universally accessible and useful. To create a global digital library is a historic opportunity, and we support the Library of Congress in this effort.”
Read the entire press release.
SEW wrote about this project this morning:
Over the past year, Google has digitized about 5,000 public domain books from the Library of Congress, material that may ultimately end up in Google Book Search, though it's not currently listed there yet. Google will continue scanning public domain books from the Library of Congress Law Library. Google said it's too early to tell if any of the scanning work it has already done will end up in the WDL.
This whole thing is very exciting. I love seeing more and more resources made available and searchable online and I agree with Danny & Gary over at SEW when they suggest that all of the digitization projects be combined to create one collection … but we all know that will never happen.
I just found out by browsing my ever growing list of library blogs that The Online Books Page at UPenn has an RSS for new books. How handy is that?! Thanks RSS4Lib & Library Stuff for pointing it out … ages ago 
Thanks to LiB for pointing out that Amazon is offering this neat new service called Amazon Upgrade.
The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to “upgrade” their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access. For example, a software developer who buys a Java programming book will not only get the physical book delivered to his or her home, but will also get 24×7 Web access to the complete interior text of the book. Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web.
