What I gather from friends who have worked at Amazon is that they supposedly have an amazing amount of data mining and gathering technology and talent. “They are data whores” is how a friend deftly put it. I’m not a big shopper, but I’ve certainly bought a half dozen items from them so they know that I like computers, computer games, and gadgets. So it never ceases to amaze me what sort of stupid, irrelevant offers they put in my Amazon Gold Box. At least once every couple of months(it used to be more frequent) I’ll look at my Gold Box and be able to say within 2 seconds for each item, “Yes indeed, there is no way in hell that I’d ever buy that”.

Maybe they have somehow picked up on my gambling mentality when I shopped for poker chips a while ago. They figure that they’ll make a game out of seeing how long I’ll come back and visit the Gold Box even though both they and I know that there is nothing I will ever want. It’s like they are testing my tolerance for low expected returns: I’m playing the shopping lottery. If that is their super-devious plan, it’s worked. I have probably browsed the Gold Box a hundred times and the purchase rate is a perfect %0. In fact I think that I’ve never even put a Gold Box item in my cart. Well done Amazon.

All the talk about Web 2.0 made me look back on how I’ve become familiar with user created content.

The first time I remember encountering user created content was back in my college days at UM around 1992 or 93. Me, Jon Haas, and Brian Ewald were rooming together off campus and we spent quite a bit of time mudding on a mud which was ironically based on the U of M campus. Once achieving the vaunted status of wizard(which was level 50 I think), wizards could build their own areas using a progamming language that was similar to an interpreted object-oriented C. Jon was already an excellent programmer at the time and Brian is literally the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, plus they both had a love for puzzles(Jon for many years was the moderator of rec.games.puzzles) and math(Brian now a math prof at Texas A&M). So they combined their brain trust and spent some late nights to produce some elegant and challenging puzzles and then put them up in the mud for all the players to try. This was all well before the explosion of the web and it was a pre-cursor to the kinds of things that a lot of games can do today. One thing that sets apart the PC gaming community from the console community is the ability to mod games. It is one reason that PC gaming franchises can be as valuable as console franchises, despite the fact that console game vastly outsell PC games.