Participation Literacy

About text:

Where We Started

Amazon.com opened its virtual doors in July 1995 with a mission to use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible. While our customer base and product offerings have grown considerably since our early days, we still maintain our founding commitment to customer satisfaction and the delivery of an educational and inspiring shopping experience.

Where We Are Today

Today, Amazon.com is the place to find and discover anything you want to buy online. We’re very proud that millions of people in more than 220 countries have made us the leading online shopping site. We have Earth’s Biggest SelectionTM of products, including free electronic greeting cards, online auctions, and millions of books, CDs, videos, DVDs, toys and games, electronics, kitchenware, computers and more.

Amazon.com was one of the first services with features which are now described with the concept Web 2.0. I have used Amazon as librarian and as private person for many years, and the feature I cherish mostly, is the network of voices creating an intelligent shopping community.

Visiting Amazon can be a bewildering experience, bordering on information overload. The first 5 seconds of the first time you are visiting Amazon’s Web site are extremely clear and understandable. The search field hits you right in the eye. It screams out to you to write something in it and hit the submit button. Writing a word in Amazon’s search field is like feeding the beast with pure energy. The Amazon beast is one of the most impressing CI (collective intelligence) machines in the world, partly because it is the blueprint for most of the Internet’s commercial CI Machines. The machine tracks your searches and clicks, and tries to feed you with contextual information, which is collected from users’ traces through the system.

On the screen you can see Listmania and different kinds of rankings. Listmania is top-lists where users list their favourite products in a certain category or subject. A person who likes Kafka might list his best books or someone who is into jazz music could list their favourite jazz CDs. Listmania is an old function at Amazon and as an isolated phenomenon it is quite Web 1.0 since the lists are personal and static. A Web 2.0 variant would probably let other users interact with the list. In a way this is the nature of the whole of Amazon. Amazon is grounded in the 1.0 mindset, but at the same time the company represents the start of 2.0. Most of the 2.0 dimension lies within the layer of collective intelligence making their product database come alive as people start to have relations to it. Amazon is quite special in the Web 2.0 company farm. Their economy is based on sales, not commercials, and their products are real things, not services. This makes Amazon an outsider, as well as some kind of big brother (not in the Orwell sense though). If Web 2.0 would come to be experienced as some kind of bubble, I guess Amazon would not be affected.

Listmania is very useful if you are subject browsing. Let us say you are curious about contemporary jazz, but do not have a clue about how to find that kind of music. If you found category listings of contemporary jazz, and picked some music; it would be at random. Amazon’s Listmania could help you find lists of a person’s favourites in the field of contemporary jazz, and you could use those suggestions as starting points for your own explorations.

If you click one of the albums in the list, you land on the product page, a page filled with information. You might want to listen to some examples, which can be done by reading the editorial review and after that browsing the user reviews. Every user review has a ranking in form of 1 to 5 stars, thus for every user review you know what that user thought of the cd in terms of bad / not so good / good / very good / excellent, or something like that. With this preliminary evaluation in mind you can start reading the reviews. If you want help to filter the reviews; you can look at the number of people who marked the review as useful. If 59 of 63 users marked a review as useful, it probably is for you too.

Recently, Amazon has also picked up the folksonomy thought - the screenshot to the left. It is possible for users to tag the product. If you think a CD is contemporary jazz but nobody has tagged it yet, you can help others by tagging it. But even if someone has tagged it already, it can be useful to tag it with the same tag since the number of people, who tagged the CD with the same tag, is aggregated and displayed within parenthesis. The CD in the figure above is Jan Garbarek’s “In Praise of Dreams”. This tagging feature is new, from the end of 2005. Most CDs do not have that many tags, but in a year or so when more people have tagged them, it might be very useful. Let us say the tagging in the screen shot looked like this instead: folk music (2), Scandinavian jazz (8), contemporary jazz (3), smooth jazz (10), world music (19) – this scenario is quite possible. I added the tags smooth jazz and world music after I took the screen shot. These numbers would mean that few people seemed to regard it as folk music, and that people who tagged it after me thought it to be smooth jazz rather than contemporary jazz, but most people regarded it as world music. This could really help me, if I never had heard about the artist.

The exploration of possibilities starts here. If I click on the contemporary jazz tag, I get a list of CDs tagged with contemporary jazz and could therefore go on to explore the genre further – actually I was the first one to use the tag “contemporary jazz” in the whole Amazon.com and Jan Garbarek was therefore the first artist to be tagged with this tag. Searching Google on the phrase “contemporary jazz” gives 1,510,000 hits; “smooth jazz” gives “ 3,070,000” hits (2006-02-18).