Within the last few hours, a trend on Twitter has emerged in response to Amazon's removing the sales ranking of books they consider to have "adult content," which also keeps those books from appearing in search results. However, while seeming to unilaterally de-list any books with gay themes and characters, many books with adult heterosexual content were left untouched.There's a move afoot to googlebomb amazon (described here) by generating links to a new definition of amazon rank. The info in the twitter stream is providing fascinating combination of wit, snark, and info about titles which have been delisted (or not--Lady Chatterly's Lover has lost its sales rank, but Lolita hasn't). And there are a host of interesting blog analyses of the subject, all with other links in them. (Becky Howard just tweeted that google news is still unaware of this story, although metafilter is reporting it.)
I'm thinking that there will be some early morning meetings at Amazon about this. Wonder what the corporate response will be. Hard to understand what they were thinking, really.
5 comments:
Yeah, I just checked their press releases a while back and was shocked that they hadn't issued a statement yet, but then remembered that it was Sunday and Easter. Tomorrow should be an interesting day over there...
there was a report later yesterday that amazon calls it a "glitch" and says it will be fixed. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/12/entertainment/e195040D58.DTL&hw=amazon&sn=001&sc=1000
I saw that report, Kathy--the email that Amazon sent to Mark Probst (which I link to on the word "interesting" above) suggests that it's really no glitch. I'm curious to see what's going on this morning, though!
yeah, might not be a technical glitch at all! but a tactical glitch? yes indeed.
hmm. according to this story, it really was a data glitch: http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp?tsp=1
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