My Dots for Thursday, March 08, 2007

A full post on Amazon.com’s social design.

Quoted: But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws lots of attention, there is one site that is way ahead of everyone else, offering a myriad of social features that eclipses the field, hands down. That site is Amazon.com. Now, we’re not feature counters by any means, but we have seen the features on Amazon provide a tremendous amount of value to users during testing of the site. The product reviews, for example, are a huge advantage Amazon holds over other e-commerce sites…people really trust the reviews there compared to everywhere else. I wrote about this phenomenon in The Amazon Effect.

Bokardo, which is always a great blog, today maps out just how social Amazon’s product detail pages are…

Apparently Arcade Fire concert tickets are pretty hard to come by right now. This is a funny video parodying the lengths that people will go to get a ticket.

Young adult literature is apparently experiencing a “Golden Age” according to this Seattle P-I article today. This is great news. When I was teenager, there was a huge gap between “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and adult-oriented fiction.

As a pretty avid young reader, my family friends used to buy me adult sci-fi novel, sometimes with horrifying consequences (not for me, for my parents). I remember being 11 or 12 and showing my dad the crazy oral sex passages I had marked in the latest book (which I had been given as a gift) I was reading. He was not enthused.

Thanks to Derek for the heads-up on this great article.

Quoted: “There has been an increase in the age of the protagonist, the complexity of the plotting and the content — the gravity of the content,” Koelling said. “I think it may be a reflection of a more sophisticated teenage population.”