Scott Walters Exploring Stuff

Amazon.com is one of the success stories of the first internet wave. Ignoring the whole disintermediation, predatory disintermediation issue that can be read about at Hal Berghler’s Predatory Disintermediation article (see http://berghel.net/col-edit/digital_village/may-00/dv_5-00.php ) lets look at the systems used by Amazon.

Now over the years I’ve bought a lot of stuff off Amazon, in the early years I’d do 4 major book orders a year for my dot com company, more recently I’ve adopted from the Philippines and Amazon has been a good source of books about a distant culture and adoption issues.

On accessing Amazon it remembered my previous purchases. I have several products that are actually in my current areas of interest being pushed to me and I must say these are actually things that interest me. Something I hadn’t noticed before is that the recommendation system now says why this book is being recommended to me which may just be that I added a book to my shopping cart but never purchased it. Thats a useful feature since I may have not actually liked the book that is causing the recommendation. Drilling into the recommendation engine reasons I can now uncheck items that I don’t want to be used to help make recommendations.

Clicking on a book title I can see all the extended purchasing information Amazon offers. No I can’t physically flick through the pages but I can “look inside” and see a few of the pages. I can also see all the other books that cite this book, other books that people who buy this book have bought, editorial review, customer review and ratings. There is a lot of information here to make a purchase decision and if I don’t think this is the right item there’s lots of information to move me to other perhaps more appealing items.

Taking one more step and going to the order process for a book reminds me of something on Amazon, this is something I’ve done before. I’m comfortable with this. I trust this organisation. Building of trust is one of the difficult things for a e-organisation and Amazon appear to have done a good job.

Refs:

Berghler, Hal.; 29/Feb/2000.; Predatory Disintermediation.; http://berghel.net/col-edit/digital_village/may-00/dv_5-00.php

Amazon Website.; http://www.amazon.com

This is a short review of online communities as an e-commerce operation. My initial thoughts are to look at myspace, amazon, ebay, and a few others and see how they do the ecommerce thing. Also of particular interest with myspace is that my organisation runs its own community there so I’ll look at how that promotes the business.

MySpace is an interesting e-commerce model. Merlo (2006) describes these sorts of sites as sharecropping systems where the the users provide free labour to build sufficient content to make the system economically viable. I do believe the following is an insightful comment:

“To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.” – Merlo (2006)

… but the term sharecropping is a negative concept and implies a form of debt slavery hence I’d say this is not really appropriate to social web experiences. since it infers the wealthy owner of the property unduely profits from the labour of the worker.

I work for the RTA and one of our communications channels happens to be a myspace profile visible at http://www.myspace.com/rtaslowdown. Now for the RTA this is a small but important channel to get the message of road safety out to the youth market and to allow them to raise issues with the Authority. While the RTA also has websites specifically targetting young drivers this outpost in the myspace community established in October 2006 allows informal communication with a key driver demographic. So, does this myspace profile rate as a ebusiness model for the RTA? My answer would be yes, its about pushing the road safety message which is a primary goal in the RTA corporate strategy.

Refs:

Mello, John P Jr.; (29/Dec/06), The Social Web: Sharing or Sharecropping?; http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/54903.html