AWS News Blog

Jeff Barr

Author: Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.

Simple Code to Access the Alexa Web Information Service

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; Modified 2/11/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired […]

Opportunity Knocks

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 […]

Hadoop Filesystem Using S3

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 […]

Some Cool HITs

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 […]

Product Wars

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 […]

Perl and EC2

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!