langreiter.com plain, simple: amzn-vista

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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amzn-vista

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6542 days AGO

AMZNVista allows you to browse Amazon's Collaborative Filter ("people who bought this also bought X, Y and Z") data.

News:

2006-05-29: The original amzn-vista has been retired for the time being.
2002-07-31: Alf Eaton has created an Amazon Browser based on a newer TouchGraph version. Check it out!

ASIN:

If you don't feel like looking up ASINs, just enter the title or name of the book, CD, video, piece of gardening equipment etc. and try to feel oh-so-very lucky (the hopefully correct ASINs are looked up by Google, it usually works pretty well):

Q: What is Collaborative Filtering?

For information on how to interact with this applet, read Martin Spernau's instructions for his GoogleBrowser. They equally apply here, as it is in essence the same applet that's used. Short version: Double-click on a node to expand the graph, right-click to see additional options (like jumping to the respective Amazon page).

A note on "ASINs" — they are the Amazon Standard Identification Numbers. In the case of books, they are the same as the ISBNs, for CDs, go to the appropriate Amazon page, cut the respective ASIN from the URL or the page text and paste below.

Rationale: HTML 'pages' are good for displaying, well, pages. Currently many graph structures are buried beneath heaps of silly text and senseless navigation, instead of being treated as the first-class members of visual Web culture they ought to be (after all, the Web itself is nothing but a pretty big graph). We're trying to reveal more-or-less hidden graphs and experiment with displaying them in a compelling and useful fashion.

Nota bene: This service is offered without that anyone at Amazon.com has been notified. If they ask me to disable it, I'll do so.

Credits: AMZNVista is, like vanilla-vista, based on TouchGraph by Alex Shapiro (contact). He rocks. Inspiration came by way of Martin Spernau. He also does rock. Thanks to Amazon.com for making their HTML nice and easily parseable. They basically rock too, silly patents aside. The backend consists of about two kilobytes of REBOL. REBOL is a webbie-nominated language the rockingness factor of which goes way through the roof.