Comments on: Asking Questions to Real People… And Getting Real Answers! http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/aws/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/ Shopping APIs and Evolving E-Commerce Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:37:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Adlucent Search Engine Marketing http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/aws/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/comment-page-1/#comment-39 Adlucent Search Engine Marketing Sun, 16 Apr 2006 06:50:57 +0000 http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/social-shopping/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/#comment-39 Edit: "Should NOT be faulted" Edit: “Should NOT be faulted”

]]> By: Adlucent Search Engine Marketing http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/aws/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/comment-page-1/#comment-38 Adlucent Search Engine Marketing Sun, 16 Apr 2006 06:50:21 +0000 http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/social-shopping/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/#comment-38 It does indeed seem like Amazon is experimenting quite a bit lately. I do not believe, however, they should be faulted. With Wiki's, tags, mechanical turk, etc, it appears Amazon is innovating and gauging acceptance. It does indeed seem like Amazon is experimenting quite a bit lately. I do not believe, however, they should be faulted. With Wiki’s, tags, mechanical turk, etc, it appears Amazon is innovating and gauging acceptance.

]]> By: Ja http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/aws/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/comment-page-1/#comment-37 Ja Fri, 17 Feb 2006 08:41:31 +0000 http://www.nextgenerationshopping.com/social-shopping/2006/02/14/asking-questions-to-real-people-and-getting-real-answers/#comment-37 All of Amazon's new next-gen features are generally very poorly implemented at the moment. The wikis, discussion boards, and and especially the tagging system make very little sense the way they're set up. There's a million comments/ratings on some popular items that come in multiple formats. There's no way I can leave or find a comment on a particular format/version, say unabridged audio book for example, but that's not really important when I can quickly see that xArmorForAmyx has tagged the book with some meaningless tag to remind herself (for all I know) to maybe buy it when she learns to read. Apparently you can have personal tags that everyone sees rather than having a distinction between those and actual useful social tagging. They should just set up building blocks and release more extensive APIs and people will develop great stuff on their own sites FOR them which would assuredly bring in more traffic right now then they get for implementing new half-assed features that only existing active users are going to be exposed to. A little more Google, a little less Microsoft. Know what I mean? Anyhow, I don't see much promise in this service or related services just now. Perhaps if they let people define the categories in which they were an expert (which could be revoked with too many poorly rated answers) and then routed the questions specifically to those people it might help but only with a really huge active userbase. These days the hardest part about getting decent answers is wading through all the crap (search engines are just filled with commercial links and "clever" squatters trying to lure you in) and finding the forums where the pros (and prosumers) go to talk shop. Once you've found such a place, there may be more than a 5-10 minute wait but overall you're likely to get a lot of quality answers/opinions on products/whatever from many people that are experts in the subject and you only have to spend a few minutes a day or so checking in, reading your thread, and possibly replying. So the key here I believe is finding top quality community forums, indexing them, and going from there. The only problem you might run into there is the forum may not care for the influx of retarded questions. I still wish there was an index of quality non-commercial review sites for products but structured blogging/microformats and aggregation should hopefully help that if it catches on more. I even have my reservations about that though. I thought of creating scripts to strip out commercial and fraudulent links from google when searching for product reviews using anti-spam measures like regex-filters, bayesian filtering, and possibly even community powered fingerprinting but then I realized, honestly, for most items there'd be no links left. Ultimately the question remains, will we actually *improve* the way individuals can use the 'net in a more efficient/effective manner before we destroy it? Ha. More thoughts to come on my blog if I ever have time to finish the design for it (kind of hypocritical for a "content > function > form" guy like me I know). Ja All of Amazon’s new next-gen features are generally very poorly implemented at the moment. The wikis, discussion boards, and and especially the tagging system make very little sense the way they’re set up. There’s a million comments/ratings on some popular items that come in multiple formats. There’s no way I can leave or find a comment on a particular format/version, say unabridged audio book for example, but that’s not really important when I can quickly see that xArmorForAmyx has tagged the book with some meaningless tag to remind herself (for all I know) to maybe buy it when she learns to read. Apparently you can have personal tags that everyone sees rather than having a distinction between those and actual useful social tagging. They should just set up building blocks and release more extensive APIs and people will develop great stuff on their own sites FOR them which would assuredly bring in more traffic right now then they get for implementing new half-assed features that only existing active users are going to be exposed to. A little more Google, a little less Microsoft. Know what I mean?

Anyhow, I don’t see much promise in this service or related services just now. Perhaps if they let people define the categories in which they were an expert (which could be revoked with too many poorly rated answers) and then routed the questions specifically to those people it might help but only with a really huge active userbase. These days the hardest part about getting decent answers is wading through all the crap (search engines are just filled with commercial links and “clever” squatters trying to lure you in) and finding the forums where the pros (and prosumers) go to talk shop. Once you’ve found such a place, there may be more than a 5-10 minute wait but overall you’re likely to get a lot of quality answers/opinions on products/whatever from many people that are experts in the subject and you only have to spend a few minutes a day or so checking in, reading your thread, and possibly replying. So the key here I believe is finding top quality community forums, indexing them, and going from there. The only problem you might run into there is the forum may not care for the influx of retarded questions.

I still wish there was an index of quality non-commercial review sites for products but structured blogging/microformats and aggregation should hopefully help that if it catches on more. I even have my reservations about that though. I thought of creating scripts to strip out commercial and fraudulent links from google when searching for product reviews using anti-spam measures like regex-filters, bayesian filtering, and possibly even community powered fingerprinting but then I realized, honestly, for most items there’d be no links left.

Ultimately the question remains, will we actually *improve* the way individuals can use the ‘net in a more efficient/effective manner before we destroy it? Ha.

More thoughts to come on my blog if I ever have time to finish the design for it (kind of hypocritical for a “content > function > form” guy like me I know).

Ja

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