Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime.org - an excellent and oft-cited example of a useful web mashup - recently won the Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. Now, it's not terribly newsworthy that yet another bit of well-earned praise has come Adrian's way, but that it's a $10,000 prize. Now who said that recent mashups aren't profitable?
 

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I just noticed today that Amazon's Goldbox is back. I follow it with interest, since I built most of the original Goldbox, and worked on the next few iterations over a year or so. Some thoughts on seeing it return:

1. Welcome back, I always enjoyed having a toy to play with at Amazon
2. Ads?! In the offer page?!
3. Nice layout and design work, very appealing
4. Giant freakin' banner ads?!
5. The DHTML widget in the top navigation is very slick - with current Goldbox status displayed on mouseover.
6. Giant freakin 3rd-party ads - in the page - that are 5 times bigger than the product image?! (And 20 times more distracting)
7. Quality of selections - some things never change :)

Of course I'll be returning soon - I'm a goldbox junkie, but those ads, come on. I don't recall seeing 3rd party banner ads (or those 300 x 250 rectangle ads) anywhere on Amazon before, but maybe I'm wrong.
 

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IMDb has a new toy, MoKa, the Movie Keywords Analyzer. tag-surf or search and discover movies related by keywords. I had fun trying to weave down obscure pathways. For instance, did you know there are at least two movies that match all the keywords "swimming-pool", "murder", "blood", "teen" and "drilling-machine"? Or, what about "czechploitation", "women's prison" and "sequel"? There are at least three matches.

They even suggest a couple games like "What's the longest string of keywords that leads to a single title?" (I'll bet the title is porn). Tag-surfing is interesting too - here's the Letter "M", with over 2,000 entries alone.

I also like the continuance of the trend toward simplicity in URL definitions - just pile the keywords on the end of the URL, like this: http://www.imdb.com/keyword/ghost/cat/hospital/.

MoKa is a lot like (and related to) Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, Concordance and Text Stats for books. (IMDb is owned by Amazon, so it's not surprising).

(I've also been told by a little bird that IMDb is looking for a couple good perl hackers/general programmers in Seattle and Bristol, UK)

 

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