Via Hacker news, this story is a gem:

“Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

Cool way to get attention.

I know, I know . . . selling books is sooo 10 years ago.

But the occasion may arise where you want to go old school and use amazon Images in your promotions. Let’s say you want to use Amazon Images in your website to promote Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. You search amazon for “wealth of nations” and see these results:

You right click on 1. Image and click view image (in firefox). and are taken to this url:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SH30_OU01_AA115_.jpg

which looks like this:

Now I don’t know about you, but that image is not all that sexy to me: it’s too small, and has that annoying “Look Inside!” at the top. You’ve probably also seen it with the kindle edition wrapper.

Here’s the trick. All of amazon’s images appear to be created on the fly from a single base image for the product. In the case above, the “original” is the image name up to the first dot followed by a .jpg.

So in the above example, that would be:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL.jpg

which as you can see, resolves as

Now you have access to the high quality original without the look inside sticker or all the extra white space.

The properties after the first dot in the image tell Amazon how to process the image on the fly. These calculations are not done in the crude way of having html resize a bigger image. They are done on the backend.

To resize the above image, after the first dot add _SL followed by the number of pixels you want in the height of the image. So, to make the above bookcover a height of, say, 240 pixels the expression would be written:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL240.jpg

It’s not rocket science; but it’s a neat little trick that uses amazon’s incredible infrastructure to support your sites. The ability to integrate this into your larger computer generated spam thoughtfully constructed mashups should be self evident.

Enjoy!

“Market competition often achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them. Antagonistic tension with his competitor sharpens the businessman’s sensitivity to the tendencies of the public, even to the point of clairvoyance, regarding the future changes in the public’s tastes, fashions, interests . . .”

-by Georg Simmel in his 1907 The Philosophy of Money

Download Youtube Videos Firefox Addon.

This is one of the more interesting takes I’ve seen on Google’s Business Model going forward.

Great write up over on TC on the various scams on Facebook and Myspace.

Gotta love Mike bitching about scams on facebook with ads like this appearing on the same page of his site:

Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. That or maybe by clicking that ad, the majority of people can make $1000 per day from 60 mins a day of work.