Riya Private Beta – innovative feedback tagging idea
I just got my invite for the Riya Private Beta (thanks!). I haven’t installed this version, yet, but the coolest part about their beta is this:
4. Bloggers are encouraged to post the good, bad and the ugly. We encourage tagging (well, yeah) and recommend the following tags (so that we can find your post faster and address your issues, if any, quickly):
Good = riyarocks
Bad = riyasobetaithurts
Ugly = riyasux
They are encouraging us to blog about their products AND giving us a way to make it easy to find user feedback ourselves!!! Here are the technorati searches for each: riyarocks (good), riyasobetaithurts (bad), riyasux (ugly). Very cool! So far, the second two are empty in technorati.
Amazon Product Previews – AJAX for Associates
Amazon recently introduced a feature called Product Previews for people who are using their Associates program. It’s pretty cool. Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliates system where sites link to Amazon products and banners with a special id in the url which gives the Associate a share of the profits from the sale of the linked products. With Product Previews, links to Amazon can now have rich popups when the links are moused over. The popups contain a product image, a buy now button, review information, etc. Note: you can move the preview window around. Doing that will ‘pin’ it to the page until you hit close.
Basically, the normal link format for Associates hasn’t changed: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/
INSERT_ASIN_HERE/INSERT_ASSOC_ID_HERE. The difference is that you add Javascript to the bottom of the page. So, all your old links to amazon products will automatically be given the Preview treatment.
For instance: Naked Conversations (book), Tron (dvd), Palm TX (pda).
During this beta period, only 50% of visitors to your pages will actually see the Previews – this is so Amazon can see if it’s helping or hurting business.
The code snippet to add the Amazon Product Preview to your site is here: snippet.txt. The official docs are here.
FlySpy – pick the cheapest dates/times/airports, interactively
TechCrunch on FlySpy:
I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple. …. in very little time I can find the best day to fly out, the best price and also the best destination.
This is great! The cycle of entering new dates/airports/times over and over, waiting for the airline site or expedia or orbitz to respsond, slooooowly, hoping for a better price, is brutal. I’m glad someone is finally going to give us a visualization of that data!!
Screenshot on TechCrunch:
FlySpy, make sure you invite information aesthetics when you have an alpha – they’ll eat it up!
Problems with Technorati
It appears that, even though I ping Technorati with every update to my blog, it’s missing the last 60 days worth of posts. Oh Brother. And, do you know how I noticed? That’s right, brrreeeport.
New slashdot feature?
Since I do most of my web reading through an RSS Aggregator, I JUST noticed this cool feature of Slashdot. When did they introduce previews of items that didn’t make it to the main page. Great idea, in my opinion. No doubt motivated by Digg’s success. Competition is grand.
John Tokash 