yanoblog

It’s funny enough that my order for a “Time Capsule” (a remote disk Apple product to manage their OS 10.5 backup solution called “Time Machine”) has been delayed. But even better was the approval cutoff date. I need an actual time machine to make the cutoff.

(For those that don’t know, Unix represents time as the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970, GMT (which is late evening, Dec 31, 1969 on the East coast of the United States). Clearly, the approval time somehow had a value of “0”).

On Amazon, I’ve noticed the occasional review by A Real Author of someone else’s book. Spy Magazine had a “Logrolling in our time” column where they would print pairs of cover blurbs:

• “Greatest Book Ever!” Dan Brown on Tom Clancy’s latest
• “The writing was… FANTASTIC!” Tom Clancy on Dan Brown’s latest

Anyway, there have to be some of these amongst all the Amazon reviews. Perhaps even a “social network explorer tool” of authors. If they are an author and have written reviews, they have a “link” to that author. If the link is bidirectional, you could color it green. And do one of those fancy-shmancy flash apps the kids are all raving about. And then wrap links to everything with an affiliate id so you could make just enough money to cover its bandwidth costs :)

I haven’t look enough at the amazon API interface to see how easy it would be to construct this. Perhaps someone else has done it?