John’s Jottings

I went to Amazon tonight to update my wishlist (birthday coming up soon) and was surprised to see a link on the front page to “John’s Plog.” A “recent article”:http://www.cio.com/archive/051504/work.html in CIO Magazine sung the virtues of a corporate “project blog” or plog and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why Amazon was telling me I now had one. Turns out that in Amazon’s world “plog” stands for “personalized blog.”

From what I was looking at it is nothing more than a couple of normal recommendations with the extended review baked into the main page. I’m luke-warm on the feature for now and in fact the addition of all that text on the main page means there are less visible links to other Amazon products on my main page. I don’t think that is a good thing for Amazon.

Here is the description of what a plog is in their words:

bq(quote). The Plog™ Service is a personalized blog. A blog is a straightforward and now widely adopted method of posting a reverse chronological diary on the Internet. Here’s a list of some of the best and most popular blogs:
<LIST SNIPPED>
Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.

You can see some of the blogs they link to in the image - “Six Apart”:http://www.sixapart.com/ gets a link as well.

Blogs. Can you say mainstream? I knew you could.