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[tinyjo]

I'm fascinated by the Amazon recommendations system. Normally these kind of things bug me - "No I don't want thank you!" - but Amazon (why does that look wrong capitalized?) has an uncanny ability to recommend to me a)things I already own but bought somewhere else and b) stuff I actually want. If you click on the why was this recommended to me link it'll tell you related purchases/wish list items but I have to wonder whether they're clocking my searches and stuff. After all, they do it on a session basis (creating a page of all the stuff you've viewed recently), why not take it a step further? (Having said that, I did a bit of searching for Linux books the other day but I didn't buy and nothings appeared in my recommendations yet...) And normally, that'd bother me. But somehow I don't mind, I'm just fascinated. Perhaps it's the fact that they do seem to resist the temptation to skew it towards whatever the flavour of the month is and stick to stuff that's actually indicated by what you've said - the fact that there's always Buffy in mine is entirely my fault. I'm sure they use this stuff when the "Other people who bought this also bought" list comes up though - I've noticed that that's become more and more relevant. It's a marketing gimmick that I actually like. I probably wouldn't buy anything completely speculatively but if something I'd been dithering about came up it's right often enough that it would actually be a point in favour of buying.

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[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Just came across that this lunchtime actually - this whole post was sparked by me going to see if a single I was interested in was out yet and finding they were recommending it to me leading to me finally getting round to playing with some of the recommendations options. Now I find myself tempted to go round rating all my favourite books so that the system works better - arrggg!