Amazon’s Plogs

Did anyone else open Amazon this week to find they had a “Plog?” “Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.”

My plog entries for that day were rather monotonous, as I had just ordered the same three books each for six staff. Amazon apparently thinks (not so far from the mark) that I might have difficulty remembering something I did yesterday, so it faithfully recreated this purchasing history, six times over.

It did make me wonder what the page would look like if I had ordered 100 books each for 600 staff, or if a user’s Plog will unbeknownst to them show up on a public screen in, oh, say, a library.

Amazon included a page explaining blogging, and listing about a dozen blogs–might be nice to see a library blog on that list.

According to the pundits, “plog” stands variously for “product blog” or “project blog.” Based on Amazon’s use of the term, “plog” also stands for Ponderous Blog (my sister asked me, “what are these ‘globs’ you keep referring to?”). Of all the blogs I don’t want to read, what I just did on Amazon is high up there. It’s far too Crusoe for my tastes (Day 2,007: caught fish; cooked and ate). Not to mention if this were a family PC how my cover would be blown for holiday shopping (particularly how much holiday shopping is for me).

As Steve Oberg noted on Web4Lib, eagled-eyed Steve Cohen, our cub reporter in the blogging world, had mentioned plogs a couple of weeks ago. However, I may not be contextually grounded in the appropriate managerial perspective to appreciate the utility of perusing a plog within this development environment (to lift language from the management rag quoted in that post).