Thursday 19 July 2007

Pic of the day: What people will do in the name of money... even unto spamming their loyal customers with ricidulous offers.

Amazon.com logic

"Magnus Itland,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Cross-Stitch Designs From China by Carol Phillipson have also purchased Nifty Plates from the Fifty States: Take a Ride Across Our Great Nation*Learn About the States from Their License Plates! by Paul Beatrice. For this reason, you might like to know that Nifty Plates from the Fifty States: Take a Ride Across Our Great Nation*Learn About the States from Their License Plates! will be released on October 1, 2007. "

(I regret to inform my faithful readers that the cross-stich book was a gift to a good friend. Now if only I had a convenient way to inform Amazon.com of the same. But even so...)

So not only does an interest in Chinese cross-stitching translate into a fascination with American license plates, but this pattern is so overwhelmingly obvious that it has been noted well before most people even knew that the licence plate book was going to be published... =_=

How about they hire a programmer with at least elementary school education for their computerized recommendation system? Someone with the wits to add a line somewhat like
IF SAMPLE < 2 GOTO END
or, if they program in lolcode (which would be eerily fitting)
IZ SAMPLE SMALLER THAN 2? KTHXBYE

I have in the past mentioned the Long Tail, the concept of a large number of items that each are in low demand. In fact, my journal is just such a thing. The people who read it is low, but there are probably millions of journals with a similar low readership. Taken together, years and years of human lives are spent on reading those things. Perhaps I should try to write shorter.

Anyway, this is a sad side effect when your interests are on the tip of the long tail: There are so few people invovled that you don't get a representative sample. In these cases, it would be wiser for Amazon to just don't say anything. Then again, when has that stopped any of us?