Author: Jeff Barr

Thom Wetzel sent me information about his new site, the Wishlist Buddy. As Thom notes: I’ve noticed that a lot of the times with books, DVDs and video games, the prices usually start out high and work their way down to less than half price over time. I used to add items to my Amazon […]

GuruLib uses a bookshelf metaphor to implement a cataloging system for books, DVDs, and CDs. After creating an account and entering your collection, you can view it in 4 different ways — All, Books, Movies, or Music. You can then further organize your collection by shelf. As the author notes in his blog, he built […]

The newest issue of the ACM Queue contains an article that I co-wrote with Felipe Cabrera (VP of Software Development at Amazon). The article, “AI Gets a Brain”, covers the fundamental concepts behind the Amazon Mechanical Turk. We start off with a historic review of the original Mechanical Turk (covered in depth in Tom Standage’s […]

DevX just published a new article, Anywhere, Anytime Storage and Retrieval with Amazon’s S3. The author starts out by noting that “Unofficial testing of the service proves that it is fast enough to support applications requiring near real-time access to data. Further, the service’s pricing makes it a great option for a diverse set of […]

Gent Hito of /N Software sent me some information about their new product, the IBiz S3 Integrator. The S3 integrator (currently in beta testing) provides an easy to use developer interface for accessing Amazon S3, with full access to create, modify, and delete buckets. Includes documentation, help, and a sample S# browser application. Developers will […]

Ed Quinn dropped me a note with information about his newest creation, AmazonCommerceService.NET. AmazonCommerceService.NET is a set of .NET classes. It creates REST requests for ECS and then queues them up, dispatching them to Amazon at the rate of 1 request per second per the license agreement. The results are delivered asychronously as they arrive, […]

I’ve known Scott Johnson for quite a while now. He did some really great work at Feedster, and he’s a diligent podcaster. Scott is never at a loss for words, so I asked him what he liked about Amazon S3, and how it helped him to architect and to build Ookles. Scott responded with a […]

First it was dogs, now it is sheep! For quite a while, a somewhat mysterious HIT would appear on the Amazon  Mechanical Turk HITs page, asking the worker to draw a sheep in exchange for a 2 cent payment. Now, we’ve seen some pretty unusual HITs, but this one really puzzled us. We weren’t sure […]