Author: Jeff Barr

The good folks over at the .Net Adventures blog have posted some .Net sample code to illustrate the process of signing an AWS request. This code should make it just a little bit easier for .Net developers to create the next great Mechanical Turk or Historical Pricing application. Update: There’s also an Active X control […]

J. Shamsul Bahri at Jiboneus.com is playing with ECS and has created the Jiboneus Cover Art application. Enter the name of an artist, and the application will display the cover art from each of the artist’s album.

As a followup to yesterday’s transcription post, I thought that it would be helpful to walk through the entire process of submitting a podcast to Casting Words and getting the results back. If you want to try this service yourself, you’ll need two things the URL to an RSS feed which contains one or more […]

Five Alexa employees are now collaborating to produce the Alexa – Web Discovery Machine blog.

I used the Podcast Transcription Store at castingWords.com to create the following transcript of the interview that I did earlier this year with Josh and Chris at the Web 2.0 Show. I spent about 10 minutes adding some links, and I fixed 2 typos in proper names. I will post more about the transcription service […]

The popular TicTap product search tool is now available in XHTML form for mobile devices at http://www.tictap.com/xhtml .

According to Trendwatching.com, a minipreneur is a consumer-turned-entrepreneur, taking advantage of resources that were, just a short time ago, available only to large multinational organizations, including cheap hardware and software, access to global design, production, and manufacturing skills, payment systems, online marketplaces, and more. The Amazon Web Services are one important element of this mix. […]

Over at BitPorters.net, Andrew has released a nice C# class which provides a clean and simple way to access the Mechanical Turk. Andrew’s code implements a TurkController class with clean, simple methods like GetQualificationRequests(), GetQualificationTypes(), ApproveQualification(), GetAccountBalance(), CreateQualification(), CreateHIT(), GetReviewableHITs(), DisposeHIT(), and so forth. It uses the SOAP version of the APIs and handles the […]

The Amazon Associates Team in Japan now has a blog of their own at http://aws.typepad.com/assoc_jp/ .  I don’t read Japanese, but it looks like they are blogging about special deals and promotions, and they are embedding plenty of cover art from books, CDs, and DVDs. — Jeff;

A previous blog posting contained an email address to be used to bring Mechanical Turk issues to our attention. The preferred way to do this is now via the Contact Us page. — Jeff;