Author: Jeff Barr

Ok readers, let’s make this guy a star: Of course, this video was itself the product of a Mechanical Turk HIT that paid $8 to the star. If you would like to star in a video of your own, there are some $10 “Make a 5 Minute Movie” HITs in there right now (that link […]

This has been the pseudocode for my day so far: while (Cool AWS Stuff In Inbox){    Read About It    Visit It    Take A Picture    Blog About It    Delete Email} Today’s newest find is Slideshare.net,  a site for storing and sharing slide shows, powered by Amazon S3. The slides are served […]

One of the interesting and common threads found in the creative applications built with the Amazon Web Services is the fact that they can take data that’s been laying out there in plain sight for a number of years and turn it on its side (so to speak) to provide a whole new look at […]

iSearchBetter simplifies the process of finding new products that are eligible for Amazon Prime shipping. As the site says: “Try it out: I think you’ll agree that I search Amazon better than they do.” — Jeff; Update: Now with links! Thanks Jeremy.

Astute readers of this blog will notice that I have added Hardware as a new category! The zBox is a new storage device from Zettabyte Storage. A zettabyte is either 1021 or 270 bytes of storage, not that the exact amount really matters at that point. The zBox is offered as part of a complete […]

Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jinesh Varia just posted a really nice article on codeproject.com . The article documents Jin’s implementation of an idea that he and I discussed shortly after he joined my team earlier this year. Building upon the concept pioneered by the seemingly defunct Usenix Faces project the application in this article shows […]

A recent HIT posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk asked workers to draw a clown… Taken at face value (so to speak) as a collaborative art project this is very similar to The Sheep Market, and it produced results that were colorful and entertaining. However, behind all of the pretty faces there’s something even more […]

A few of the cool things that I have sitting in my inbox today: Mechanical Turk API in PHP – “PHP implementation of the Amazon Mechanical Turk API, allowing any PHP application to access the mTurk system and perform all available actions.“ Dave Winer: It’s an S3 Tuesday – “S3 is truly useful.” John Eberly: […]

Jeremy Zawody followed up on his promise to use Amazon S3 for backup by compiling a list of S3 Backup Tools. The article itself is very helpful, but there’s also a lot of good information in the comments. At this point Jeremy is in the process of enumerating and examining the alternatives. I’m sure that […]

Earlier today Jeff barr told me that he uploaded all his photos to amazon S3 using S3Fox Organizer. S3Fox Organizer, developed by Rahul Jonna, is a firefox extension for managing your objects in Amazon S3. We had blogged about it earlier. Motivated by the number of hits he received, Rahul released a new version (v0.3) […]