Fascinating development at Amazon. After creating a business on digital books, they are expanding their marketing efforts. And as an Amazon affiliate (for testing purposes only, of course), I am part of that effort. It is now possible for me to embed a Kindle book (or at least its first few pages, into a blog post.

See for example the first few pages of Rocket Surgery Made Easy (which I should buy and read):

(If you’re reading this through my RSS feed, you might want to open this post in your browser, just to try it out.)

Amazon are giving me a cut of whatever sale is made on the back of my embedding this, so they basically recruit me as a sales staff, with no fixed salary and only performance-related bonuses, a vanilla online affiliate model.

This doesn’t yet allow me to quote a specific part of the book, a limitation I understand but limits the usefulness of the feature.

By the way, you had better read Krug’s first book, Don’t Make Me Think. (And yes, I get a cut from that link, too!!)

On the island of Teshima, on Japan’s Seto inland sea, Christian Boltanski installed his Les Archives du Cœur project, in which the heartbeats of visitors are recorded, filed, and can be listened to. The intro for the Teshima installation refers to a permanent building, in which a recording booth and a listening booth are available, next to the main “arty” piece, a long room, fairly dark, lit with a single blinking bulb, with mirrors on the walls in which the bulb is reflected but the visitors are all but invisible. The official blurb states:

The experience provided by this project encourages visitors to realize that no two people are the same, and to reflect on human individuality and the evanescence of memory.

However, it seems to me the point of this work is very different from its presentation, and focuses instead on human compliance, and on feature creep in computerized databases of personal data.

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You surely remember those amazing scenes in Minority Report where Tom Cruise manipulates several video streams, comparing them, replaying them, using hand gestures.

The company that created the interfaces seen in the movie is now releasing info about a similar commercial product. It is a fascinating opportunity to extend our ability to interact with computer data.

However, I have the vague fear that such non-verbal interfaces hold the false promise of liberating the human race from efforts, and in particular from the effort of learning languages.

This is obviously not a criticism of this specific (and awesome) project. It’s rather an observation about the mental state such projects are fostering, a certain type of magical thinking, where machines improve their understanding of human desire, to the point that we no longer need to verbalize it.

We believe that through technical progress, expressing our will shall eventually be replaced with merely manifesting it.

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Blink.

After parsing the convoluted language, my reaction to this comment on my blog was, “yeah! Finally someone understands my posts.”

Then I realized: this is social engineering. The language is there to fool spam filters, and the flattery to make me want to hit the “publish comment” button. Nice try!