I’ve been playing around with Amazon‘s web services because in my quest to make money off my blogs (quixotic? I don’t know yet), I thought it would be interesting to implement book recommendations based on keywords pulled from individual blog entries.
What got me thinking about this is that my Amazon associate links have already generated three orders from books I’ve linked to (two from The Brew Site and one from here), which kind of surprised me since I haven’t had the Amazon affiliation for very long. But I don’t really want to spend all my time writing about books just to generate clickthroughs—seems to go too far on the “shill” side of things—so I figured I go more the route of the Google AdSense ads: automatically generating results from content.
The web services are pretty straightforward, though I have to wonder why the PDF documention you can download is over 400 pages long. Holy crap! Instead, I did a quick read through the HTML version they have and picked up enough in a half hour to get started.
So, you might start seeing Amazon recommendations appearing on the individual entry pages. It’ll be an experiment; if I don’t like how they work, I’ll pull them.
You want to share the code so I can play, too? 🙂
Actually, there’s an MT plugin for this (http://mtamazon.sourceforge.net/) that’s pretty well used and does lots of cool stuff, but I’d rather do something in PHP to save on server load (plugins like that slow down rebuilds). I’ve only linked to a few amazon items on my site, usually including my affiliate tags, and have garnered a whole $.45 or so.