The Atom and RSS Gods complained about my feeds. I made some offerings to the sacred Validator and I now no longer have to fear their wrath.
I aplogize to those readers who had to suffer through a series of confusing feed updates and I welcome those who can now suddenly actually consume the feeds
Dennis Howlett reminds me that the last paragraph of my Naked Answers post suggests that I think the only way innovation happens is in reaction to customer demand. Customer feedback is an important ingredient, but not of course not the only component. Henri Fords famous quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, "Faster horses.”" signifies that to make a real difference revolutionary thinking is required. I live on the balance of these two components every day.
Today Shel Israel and Robert Scoble stopped by at Amazon to present their book Naked Conversations in our Fishbowl series. As you can read in Shel's observations and Robert’s they appear shocked that we used a critical voice to address their work. Welcome to life at Amazon, we set a very high bar for our own works and we expect anyone that comes to sell us an approach to actually be prepared to really defend their ideas. Just because blogs are cool and everybody is doing them does not automatically mean that we should institutionalize them at Amazon. We have a long history of promoting customers to use their voice about our products and our operations, so if you come to Amazon to tell us our business is going to really suffer if we do not blog, you better be prepared to defend your ideas with very strong arguments and hard evidence. We expect that from anyone, externally or internally, who wants to promote an idea within Amazon.
This was my approach with challenging Shel and Robert at our lunch meeting. I wanted them abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong. Instead they appeared shell-shocked that anyone actually had the guts to challenge the golden wonder boys of blogging and not accept their religion instantly. I have been a promoter of weblogging for a long time, so I didn't feel particularly bad to challenge these two authors to tell me why customers would get a better Amazon product if we would institutionalize blogging at a wider scale around Amazon. Beyond "a more human face" and "conversations with individuals from Amazon" there was no real response how blogging will make the product named Amazon.com better for our customers given all the techniques we already use from soliciting customer feedback to discussion forums to snooping weblogs and comments sites, etc,. In my mind they had no solid data-driven answers to these challenges, which I would have expected from two seasoned evangelists. I myself actually knew some of the answers to my questions, but I was surprised to see that these guys were not prepared enough to slap me around with solid answers.
What I am a bit disappointed by is that these two smart guys did not understand what was going on, even though I clearly said that I was challenging them to a response. And they make the suggestion in their responses (at least Shel does) that Amazon doesn't "get" blogging. They are wrong. Amazon is a long time pioneer in the space of involving their customers with our product. And we really listen to our customers; any Amazon employee who encounters an issue on a forum or weblog or at any other place is empowered to escalate those issues internally immediately until they get fixed. Customer feedback is essential for Amazon and we will use all effective means to get it.
Shel wrote:
I left with the personal sense that it will be a tropical day in Seattle before any blogging between companies ad customers is forthcoming from Amazon.
Well it will certainly not happen because Shell and Robert convinced us with solid evidence of the tremendous benefits. If it does happen at a wider scale than it happens now, it will be because our customers have given us feedback that they think blogging is an excellent approach to interact with Amazon. Amazon will continue to innovate with involving customers with our sites, some of those may be weblog or wiki related techniques, many of those will be completely new approaches as people have come to expect from Amazon. We will do this because our customers want us to, not because "everybody else is doing it".
Update: In various comments and follow-up posts the authors express that they feel the questions at the presentation were rude, and that my response to their description of the meeting is not accurate. I am very sorry they feel that way, and I am sure there were people in the room who agree with them. I hope they do not hold my (perceived) rudeness as the test against which to hold those Amazonians. That said, I have also heard enough views by now that do not support Shel & Robert’s recantation of the event, and there were several people who feel it was appropriate to question them hard and deep. Most people seem to agree that my line of questioning was somewhat unforgiving when I felt they didn’t come up with the right answers. I promise to be nicer to our next guests …
Update 2 I think I prefer Nick Carr's characterisation: refreshingly blunt.
Update 3 If you read the posting well, you will find that ROI does not appear in it. That is on purpose as the questions about innovation and about providing value need to be answered first before you can talk about at what cost.
Halley Suitt, now CEO of Top Ten Sources, has a way of talking me into doing things where I actually have no time for. This time it was giving her a list of my top ten weblog feeds. This is an impossible task as I don’t think there is such an absolute list, but try and explain that to someone who runs a company called Top Ten Sources. So I compromised by selecting some of the categories I have organized my readings into, and from each category I have picked one or two weblogs that I find consistently worth while reading. You can find the list at werner-vogels-top-10.toptensources.com.
PS. In retrospect I think that in a past life Halley must have been Eve in the Garden of Eden, as I am sure she can talk any man into eating the whole darn apple.
On the A9 Developer weblog there is an article today on he SiteInfo feature that was until now only available when you used the A9 Toolbar. They now have developed a Firefox extension that will give you the same functionality. Normally the siteinfo tab gives you the Alexa information about a site: traffic ranking, reviews, etc., and it presents you with a short “people that visit this site also visit …” list of sites. However if you go to IBM.com or Amazon.com you will see that this tab changes into a site navigation menu. The posting on the A9 weblog today and an earlier posting in September give some other examples.
You can control this through the generation of a sitinfo.xml file, to be placed in the root directory of your website. The details of the file format are in the SiteInfo Spec. I added a template to my moveable type installation that automatically generates this with a menu for the last postings, categories, etc.
My moveable type template for this can be downloaded from here. Set it up as a new template to generate a file siteinfo.xml on rebuild.
Because of my absentmindedness last year I forgot to point to another writer that has joined the public Amazon/A9 weblog family: In december Claire Giordano of opensolaris fame joined A9 as director of product management. Please visit Claire's Alternate Version of Reality.
In case you didn't know; I am Dutch. If you would have heard me speak you probably would have guessed that tidbit of useless information. In the past months I have received a number of criticizing comments that I am not keeping up with the all the developments in the Netherlands in terms of computing and ecommerce. To be honest I have very little insight into how the Dutch IT world has developed, given that I left the Netherlands almost 15 years ago. A lot has happened since.
Some of my Dutch contacts have now started to convince me that it would be interesting to follow some of the more recent developments. I am looking for a few good Dutch feeds that would allow me to track what is going on in IT and ecommerce in the Netherlands. I had been given 3 links to bootstrap: webwereld.nl, vnunet.nl and emerce.nl. Some of these seem to be mainly international news translated into Dutch, so I am looking for some more links to really good Dutch feeds.
I have redirected the rss & atom feeds at weblogs.cs.cornell.edu to the their new home at http://www.allthingsdistributed.com. I used a permanent redirect so I am hoping that bloglines and other aggregators will eventually figure out that they should start polling those feeds directly instead of continue to be redirected by the old site.
On a side note: for me the out-of-the-box mt 3.2 atom feed doesn't validate. I fixed one tag, but still have to see what to do with the rest of the complaints.
I have not redirected the static pages yet, as I first want to see what I can do to leave all the referrer spam behind. I wasn't aware of this crazy phenomena until I had a look at the server log files for the first time in a year. I'll look for some isapi filter to cure this.
A lot of things happened in that past months that were worthwhile writing about. New distributed systems and architectural insights, great conversations, new gadgets, good books, interesting articles and conferences, and some very cool new Amazon.com technologies (e.g. Mechanical Turk and the public access to Alexa). However I thought that it was appropriate to first move the weblog from the Cornell servers to a personal place. That took a while to materialize, but I believe I now have everything in place to execute this move.
This weblog will move to http://www.allthingsdistributed.com, where I will post the new writings. The postings from the past 3 years will move to http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/historical, and I will set up redirects in the coming days to make sure everyone gets to the new servers whether they want or not. It will be interesting to see whether the aggregators can indeed handle the feed redirects.
I am grateful to Cornell for letting me continue to use the weblogs server in the past year, and I am now looking forward to catching up with old and new friends on all things distributed.
