Author: Jeff Barr

My friend Adam Rifkin just pointed me at some simple PHP code to access the Alexa Web Information Service. You will need PHP 5 and the mhash library. You can find even more such code in the Resource Center. Thanks Adam!   — Jeff;

RSS pioneer Dave Winer has an idea for a cool application powered by S3. In his post “Opportunity Knocks,Try #3” Dave explains his idea: I want to define a cloud in Amazon S3 space, a cloud of subscription information, some of it public and some of it only accessible to the user. We’re going to […]

I blogged about Hadoop on EC2 late last year. In a nutshell, Hadoop is an open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce algorithm. MapReduce is a simple and efficient programming model for processing large data sets using a whole bunch of processors (you are supposed to start thinking of EC2 at this point). Tom White sent […]

There are some really interesting Mechanical Turk HITs available right now. Using a Flash application which is actually embedded in the body of the HIT, workers tag a sequential series of images to denote the presence of certain road features — yellow lines, manholes, drains, bollards, and pedestrian crossings. Read more about these HITs at […]

I really love The DVD Wars, and I know that I’m not the only one… During my recent visit to Tokyo, an executive with a major consumer electronics company actually brought a printout of the site’s front page to the meeting. He told me that the site was a regular hangout for him and for […]

Last last year I announced that an unnamed company was conducting a live seminar in the Seattle area and that they were holding some spaces open for AWS developers. I was able to attend that session, and can report that I saw some really, really cool development tools. In the space of the day I […]

I just received word that we have opened up some more slots in the Amazon EC2 beta. If you want to start using EC2 stop reading this message and click here now to sign up. Go to that page and click on the “Sign Up For Web Service” button in the upper right. If you […]

It’s gratifying to see third-party projects that interface with Amazon Web Services. For example, you can download a Perl Interface to Amazon EC2 from Jeff Kim on CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), released on December 28th. Check it out at search.cpan.org/~jkim/Net-Amazon-EC2-0.02. — Mike Update: Title of post changed from PHP to Perl!

The Amazon.co.uk associates team has a nice blog. Recent topics include monthly payments of associates fees, dealing with foreign bank accounts, self-optimizing links with discount stickers, and information on 13-digit ISBNs. Update: The Amazon.de associates team also has one! — Jeff;

WPF/E is Microsoft’s next-generation presentation for creating rich web experiences. Using an XML vocabulary known as XAML, WPF/E supports both cross-browser and desktop applications which run on Windows and on the Mac. If you would like to learn a bit about the use of WPF/E in conjunction with the Amazon E-Commerce Service, you should check […]