ResearchBuzz

I am spending a lot of time with the Amazon ECS service — it’s the good twin, I’ve decided, and the Amazon search engine on the Web site is the evil twin. (Kidding. The frustrating twin, perhaps.) While I was going through the documentation and doing experiments on the site I noticed a couple of things of interest.

First: Jeff Bezos has reviews on the site. Not many, but some. Apparently he hates The 13th Warrior and loves milk. He prefers very expensive cheese straws, very expensive binoculars, and Cory Doctorow.

If you’re not into Jeff Bezos, you might want to check out Amazon’s new video review features. Yup, Amazon is now inviting customers to post video reviews of products. You can browse around looking for the reviews, or you can try searching inurl:videopreplay site:amazon.com on Google to see the half-dozen it has indexed.

The videos varied a lot. I liked Aaron Wilson spinning around on his Heelies. Other videos I looked at covered cell phones, cameras, and watches. One video actually showed a musician handmaking her CD labeling and packing, with the CD for sale at Amazon. (You can watch the packaging getting made and listen to the 4th track on the CD.) Maybe I can find some vacuum cleaner reviews…

Andrea wants to have a WordPress Upgrade Party. What a nice idea.

LexisNexis launches new guide to domain name law.

Social networking and bookmarking for doctors: PeerClip.

New blog on investing: http://www.investmentcapitalist.com/. There’s an ad here of a guy’s head popping out of a wad of money. For some reason it is COMPLETELY creeping me out.

NY Times launches new blog devoted to TV Industry: TV Decoder.

Medical marketing laws by state.

I’m still trying to figure out if Twitter has a place in my universe (for one thing, it seems like a lot of trouble to keep up with, and for two things, I’m pretty boring.) But in the meantime I’m having fun playing with TweetVolume, which allows you to enter words and see how often they’re being used on Twitter.

Looks like a Google search restricted to Twitter but it doesn’t have to be complicated to be fun. You can enter up to five words and phrases and get a graph of which words are the most popular. Try searches like breakfast lunch dinner or brand names.

If this tool made use of Google’s daterange syntax, and allowed you to do searches on words within the last week or the last month, that would be even more fun…