Author: Jeff Barr

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;

The Alexa Web Search Platform is now accepting applications from potential beta testers. The Alexa Web Search Platform allows you to write and run code that runs on a server complex hosted and run by Alexa. To use this service, you write code which calls the Search Platform API. Your code is responsible for processing […]

If you can read and write French and English, today is your lucky day. Bitporters Media is now qualifying Mechanical Turk Workers to handle translation and approval HITS. The former pays 40 cents for up to 512 characters of text; the latter, 30 cents. — Jeff; Modified 3/10/2021 – In an effort to ensure a […]

Since the beta launch of the Amazon Mechanical Turk last month, members of our developer community have been working hard to encode their HITS (Human Interface Tasks) into the system. One of the first to make it to this point is the Casting Words site (itself still in beta). Casting Words uses the Mechanical Turk […]

DevX.com has published a new article, Creating Windows Starter Kits for Visual Studio 2005. The starter kit described in the article happens to call ECS to do book lookup. You can find more starter kits, including an Amazon-powered Movie Collection application in the Visual Studio Developer Center.   Modified 1/26/2021 – In an effort to […]

Bob DuCharme has put together a master list of his Transforming XML columns. Bob is also the author  XSLT Quickly, shown at the right.

Things have been even busier than usual here at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. On the evening of Wednesday, November 2nd, we announced that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was ready for beta testing. Momentum for most beta tests builds quietly at first. A few users and developers put a toe or two into the water, give it […]