Amazon.com

Shelfari: Social bookmarking for books

Shelfari is a social network and recommendation service that lets you flaunt your book collection to others, and discover new titles worth reading. Yesterday Shelfari announced a round of funding, with Amazon.com being the top contributor.

If you've ever seen Delicious Monster, Shelfari is visually similar, with virtual bookshelves that house your collection as long as you're willing to manually input all your titles. The result is a slick-looking listing to share with others on your blog or Web site (see below), and make friends with people who have similar tastes to swap recommendations.

Each Shelfari book … Read more

Web news roundup: John McCain, Flip, Gmail, Amazon and TiVo, Ransomeware, Vodafone and MySpace

>> Senator to propose surveillance of illegal images. John McCain wants to give surveillance duty to your Internet service provider and to Web sites to crack down on child pornography. All questionable images would be flagged and sent to the authorities with your IP address. (CNET News.com)

>> Flip launches. Conde Nast's answer to MySpace and other social networks. The service, aimed at teenage girls, lets you create a scrapbook of sorts in the form of a flip book. Your flip book can then be shared on other services. (Mashable)

>> Gmail leaves beta. Lately … Read more

OpenSolaris leader leaves Sun for Amazon

Claire Giordano, the Sun executive who led the introduction of the Sun's OpenSolaris operating system project and its accompanying open-source Community Development and Distribution License, is leaving the company for a to work for Amazon's A9 search engine project.

Giordano announced the move on her blog Sunday. OpenSolaris is an ambitious project to restore the relevance of Sun's Solaris version of Unix by making it open-source software. One of Solaris' chief rivals, Linux, was open-source from the start, but competitors, including IBM's AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Microsoft's Windows, remain proprietary.

"OpenSolaris is now … Read more

Amazon, like Google, gets transcendental

In e-commerce, transcendental numbers are all the rage.

Google, which prides itself on its Ph.D. population, started things off with a novel use of "e," a fundamental mathematical constant that's the base of natural logarithm calculations. Google priced its initial public offering such that it would raise $2,718,281,828--the product of e and $1 billion.

Perhaps trying to grab a little nerd cachet of its own, Amazon.com is promoting its A9 search engine by using pi, a circle's circumference divided by its diameter. Frequent users of A9 get a discount of pi/… Read more

Amazon keeps plogging away

Was this review helpful to you? Somebody must be answering that question on e-commerce sites, because they keep asking it. Now Amazon has patented a method of serving up collections of those little product reviews, or "blurbs," in personal logs, or "plogs."

The patent in question, "Personalized selection and display of user-supplied content to enhance browsing of electronic catalogs," describes a system in which the online vendor's algorithms plug a targeted collection of someone else's blurbs into your plog.

"Electronic catalogs commonly lack the types of compelling content needed to attract … Read more