Amazon Wikis, iTunes Store Reviews & RSS

Published by in economics, edtech on November 23rd, 2005

I noticed today that Amazon.com has started to embrace wiki technology and allow users to leave comments and make links on their site. It will be interesting to see if a self-policing wiki community develops on the Amazon site similar to what we’ve seen on the WikiPedia.

I also noticed this morning that the iTunes music store has added a new feature: Customer Reviews. You have to login with your iTunes store ID, but you can rate albums and write reviews, similar to what Amazon has been doing for quite awhile.

These are both good ideas, in that they leverage the power of collective authoring and expertise in each community. We should be using similar tools in the educational sphere to help people learn to better collaborate and exchange perceptions for mutual benefit.

I also saw today that you can create RSS feeds that come directly from the iTunes music store for a particular genre of music you like. The generator thankfully lets you filter “explicit content” out of the feed. You can create a feed for multiple genres, and have the feed be for new releases, top songs, top albums, etc. You can also specify the number of total items to be included in the feed. This is similar to (but more customizable than) the RSS feed options Netflix offers. Very powerful and fast ways to access customized, dynamic content. This is what 21st century information access is all about.

I created a new category called “audio” in my public bloglines feeds and added feeds for new releases, top albums, and top songs in the iTunes music store for easy listening, folk, new age, and world music genres. It is interesting and perhaps telling that iTunes has never included a separate category for “Christian” music. Too bad, because I would have included that genre in my RSS feeds as well if it was available.

On this day..

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