Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Friday, October 02, 2009

Halloween : Costumes, Candy , Party Supplies and More

Amazon.com > Clothing > Specialty Apparel > Costumes and Accessories

It's Halloween! Time to haul out the yard displays, crank up the Nox Arcana, don your scariest mask, put the cobwebs and spiders around the door, and prepare to give the costumed children in the neighborhood a little show with their buckets of candy, and their safety glowsticks! HA ha ha aha!

Seriously, Amazon has everything you'd want for Halloween from mild to wild. Fog machines, zombies, sound effects, vampire gear -- you name it, Amazon probably has it. It's time to find all those Elvira DVDs you need. There's so much, in fact I'm planning another Halloween post soon.

Browse Departments
Browse Features

Halloween Books


You can find books on just about any subject, which makes them a wonderful tie-in for a mixed department page like this one. While there used to be a specific "Nonfiction Halloween" category, I see than Amazon has just one Holiday Nonfiction category, apparently allowing seasonal sales to bring the appropriate books to the top. It might work.

Popular Searches

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Popular CDs (Music) @ Amazon.com I

This is the one of a series of quick articles on popular products from Amazon.com. Of course, the most obvious measure of popularity is Amazon sales rank, the default listing order of Amazon's aStores. That order is already represented in the search engine listings, at least in theory. These items are ones that I have actually sold.

The idea here is that these items are popular enough that someone would buy them, but not so popular that they are widely listed elsewhere. Though this approach may seem wildly random, it is very likely that if someone bought these before, someone else might want to buy them in the future. Perhaps they are just what you're looking for!

Music CDs

Popular CDs (Music) @ Amazon.com II

This is the one of a series of quick articles on popular products from Amazon.com. Of course, the most obvious measure of popularity is Amazon sales rank, the default listing order of Amazon's aStores. That order is already represented in the search engine listings, at least in theory. These items are ones that I have actually sold.

The idea here is that these items are popular enough that someone would buy them, but not so popular that they are widely listed elsewhere. Though this approach may seem wildly random, it is very likely that if someone bought these before, someone else might want to buy them in the future. Perhaps they are just what you're looking for!

Music CDs

Sunday, March 09, 2008

How Google Sees My Site(s) - II

Google isn't necessarily the best search engine; in fact I'd rate it third out of a field of four. Nonetheless, a recent survey showed that Google accounted for 58% of all the searches performed on the Internet. Obviously, Google's opinion is important to any webmaster whose goal is to attract viewers to their content. The following Amazon.com products are those that Google believes are the most "significant" ones listed in my Amazon aStores.

Google's idea of significance isn't necessarily mine -- or yours. My goal is to help shoppers find what they're looking for -- a task which should correlate pretty well with sales (which, of course, is my real goal.) Google's evaluation is based on a number of mostly irrelevant data, which produces some fairly odd results. (Similar results can be found with Live Search and Yahoo! )

Here are a couple hundred products Google thinks you'll be interested in. Frankly, none of them have been big sellers for me, but that could change. In any case, I've placed them into the appropriate subcategory aStores, which should help customers and indexing 'bots alike.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Amazon Classical Music Forum's Listmania

I'm no expert on classical music, although I have been known to listen to NPR at times. As I slogged my way through a major expansion of my Classical Mania aStore, I was surprised at just how many of the featured artists I actually had heard of. I guess I should have expected that. Classical music is part of our culture, after all. Not pop-culture or counter-culture, just plain culture -- the things we all hold in common that bring us together.

Stereotypes about classical fans abound, but I discovered in glancing over Amazon's Classical Music Forum they are actually a pretty diverse group. I was encouraged to find that the forum was less opinionated and more informative than the dread pop-music boards. There was also a considerable amount of attention paid to beginning classical buffs. I guess everybody has to start somewhere.

If you're looking for E. Power Biggs definitive recording of Bach's renowned Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, it's here. (A recording I know of strictly as a stereo equipment enthusiast. I mean you could smoke-test your bass with Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida, but how prosaic that would be!)

You might be surprised how much classical music you've heard a thousand times, but just couldn't name. After all, The Lone Ranger and Beat the Clock didn't have to pay royalties to Rossini and Khachaturian! You can also give yourself a big pat on the back if you immediately realized that Arthur Sullivan is more often mentioned in conjunction with his librettist William S. Gilbert.

Here is a selection of classical music Listmania lists from the Amazon Classical Music Forum:

  1. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Symphonic Cycles
  2. Listening List for Trumpet Students
  3. Hoshour's Guide to World Class Violin & Cello Concertos
  4. Hoshoshour's Guide to Definitive Beethoven Symphonies
  5. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Bruckner Symphonies
  6. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Brahms Symphonies
  7. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Piano Concertos
  8. Hoshour's Guide to Definitive Mahler Symphonies
  9. Music CDs I Listen to in 2007, and Music CDs I Recommend.
  10. Sublime Beethoven recordings
  11. Essential Prokofiev
  12. Best Brahms Symphony Cycles according to The Penguin Guide
  13. Best Beethoven Symphony Cycles according to The Penguin Guide
  14. Got Scenery?
  15. Wade's Piano Student Listening List #1
  16. My favorite classical recordings of 2007
  17. ~Handel's MESSIAH~the best recordings~
  18. A Ranking of Rach 3
  19. Music of Howard Hanson
  20. Favorite "Messiah" Recordings
  21. My 20 Desert Island Recordings
  22. Essential Brahms
  23. Christmas-Themed Classical Music
  24. Mahler for Audiophiles
  25. Great Christmas Music From Various Genres
  26. CHRISTINE SCHäFER's GREATEST REALIZATIONS...
  27. GLENN GOULD's GREATEST REALIZATIONS.
  28. My favourite opera recordings on DVD
  29. Great Classical at a Great Price!
  30. Favorite Classical Music on the Philips Label
  31. A Must-Have Mahler Cycle
  32. A Strauss-Lover's Four Last Songs
  33. My Favorite Italian Pop
  34. Collecting the Deutsche Grammophon Collector's Series Classical CDs
  35. Deutsche Grammophon "Archiv" Favorite Recordings
  36. Building an Outstanding Classical Music Library with Box Sets
  37. The World of Classical Music and the Performing Arts!
  38. A Debussy Discography
  39. Classical Trumpet
  40. Some uncommonly beautiful recordings
  41. Not Just for Longhairs: Funny Classical Music
  42. Leonard Bernstein, Renaissance Man
  43. Classical Entry Points
  44. Musical Performance Practice Favorites
  45. Classical Music starter list
  46. Classical Music
  47. Classic Recordings of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos
  48. Classical pieces recorded by progressive rock groups
  49. Classical Music - sophisticated structures in sound from the Masters
  50. Classical Music For People who don't like Classical Music
  51. Heavenly Voices

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Featured Classical Music

This article really is about Classical Music, but first I'm going to "entertain" you with a brief diatribe on the semantic web and search engine optimization. People like choices, but they don't like to be overwhelmed with a very large number of choices. Amazon.com's approach to this is a logical one: They arrange their products into broad categories, which are divided into subcategories, and further into sub-subcategories for as many levels as they find appropriate, as in the familiar outline form.

This is reasonable, but it presents a problem to those searching for products. Without a key to Amazon's taxonomy (or outline), one might easily take a wrong turn in the process of "drilling down" to the specific target classification. Search engines don't adequately address this problem. Attempts to search for a specific category simply return all items containing the search keywords instead of limiting results to category headings.

Google's PageRank alogrithm (and other search engine ranking schemes that are less well-documented) only compounds this problem. Briefly, search engines assume that the more specific "lower" levels of the outline are less significant than the "higher," more general headings. In fact, we humans already have our own taxonomy in our rich and diverse languages (English, in this case). It is far more likely that we will select highly specific terms in our very first search attempt than extremely broad ones. PageRank is upside-down.

What does this have to do with classical music? Only this: Amazon's Classical Music category is a recent spin-off of their more general Music category and has relatively few subcategories. Therefore, I hope to achieve my goal of creating more useful search engine listings sooner and more directly in these top-level categories:





Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Top Listmania!(TM) Lists: All Categories

Amazon publishes a list of "Top Listmania Lists," but it's not entirely clear how these lists are rated. Ratings don't seem to be based on helpful votes or number of times read -- at least not entirely. I suspect they are rated largely according to their conversion rates -- how likely readers are to actually purchase items from the list. That would certainly make sense from Amazon's point of view, and come to think of it, mine too.

For the most part these lists supply additional information beyond just the automatic pictures, prices, and links to product pages. Whether you find this information credible or not is your call, but apparently others have found it helpful, and that is a big plus!

  1. Some Cookbooks for a Creole or Cajun Kitchen
  2. My favorite Bond movies!
  3. Nick Hornby and Company!
  4. Doctor Who - Sixth Doctor (Baker Seasons 21-23)
  5. The Poetry of Ryokan
  6. Cool Passions I Profess
  7. Recommended Tanka Poetry Books
  8. Kanshi
  9. Refined Kabbalah
  10. Japanese Poetry
  11. Buddhism & Women - The Feminine
  12. The U.S. invasion of Vietnam
  13. Ryokan's poetry
  14. Haiku
  15. Zen Buddhism: Old-Style
  16. Japanese Novels and Stories in Good English
  17. Doctor Who - Third Doctor (Pertwee Seasons 7-11)
  18. Koto and Shakuhachi
  19. Doctor Who - Seventh Doctor (McCoy Seasons 24-26)
  20. Fun books about Chickens
  21. Top Ten UNIT Operations (Doctor Who)
  22. Issa - Haiku Poet
  23. Doctor Who - Fifth Doctor (Davison Seasons 19-21)
  24. Historical Fiction set in Asia (includes India)
  25. Off the Beaten Path in Historical Fiction
  26. Beautiful Kyoto
  27. Dharma Bum Inspiration
  28. Candlemaking Mysteries by Tim Myers
  29. Hanshan - Cold Mountain Poems
  30. Appreciation for Sanford Goldstein
  31. HK Fantasy
  32. Best Books I've Read This Year
  33. Buson - Haiku Poet and Painter
  34. Some Great Burton Watson Books
  35. Heroic Friendships
  36. Wandering Through Japan
  37. Basho - Haiku Master
  38. Intellectual Apothecary
  39. The Psychedelicon
  40. Great SciFi Books Harriet Klausner has NOT reviewed!
  41. Inspiring sci-fi and fantasy (yes, it does exist!)* under construction
  42. Qumran Cave
  43. Samurai - Origins to Warring States Part I
  44. Sweet ,Romantic DVDS
  45. Explorer Series - Complete*
  46. The Art of Andrey Tarkovsky
  47. my favorite music
  48. Welcome Oscar
  49. A Few Good Catholic Titles
  50. Amazon Shorts: GOLD-DUSTED-GATEWAYS into Star-Studded Minds.
  51. Doctor Who - Second Doctor (Thoughton Seasons 4-6)
  52. A little perfume goes a long way...
  53. Hemmingsonia!
  54. Czech books
  55. Autumn
  56. Doctor Who - First Doctor (Hartnell Seasons 1-4)
  57. Horror Books That Shouldn?t Be Missed
  58. Faith Scrapbooking
  59. Book Video Trailers!!!!!!!
  60. HUMOR IN MANY LANGUAGES
  61. Self, Soul & Consciousness; Physics, Philosophy & Biology of
  62. Books to Read Aloud to a Kid an Adult Can Love, Too
  63. Reading Films is Fun--Spanish Language Films
  64. "Rockin Good Stories, Good Wine, and Great Food"
  65. My Favorite Ambleside Online "Extras" List 1
  66. Doctor Who on DVD -- The New Series
  67. Doctor Who: The Handbooks
  68. Cifford Pickover
  69. Infinite Wealth of Knowledge and Networks
  70. Vernon Joynson
  71. I Feel Better Because of.......poems?
  72. Mystery in History
  73. Book clips, book videos, book trailers
  74. Not Your Typical Board Games
  75. 25 Mucho Fantastic Horror Stories
  76. What I've read in 2007 (to be updated)
  77. Stranded on a Deserted Isle With Just 5 Books
  78. The most underrated Doctor Who stories
  79. Third Set of The New Adventures (Virgin Doctor Who novels)
  80. LOVE HAS STRANGE WAYS
  81. A CLASSICAL SCHOLAR : MICHAEL GRANT (As Author&Translator)
  82. The Old Testament
  83. Rainbow Water
  84. Space-Age Cocktail Music
  85. Be a (Thinking) Conservative
  86. Best Doctor Who on DVD
  87. I really DO love Lucy!
  88. The Thinking Man's Guide to 30 Best Japanese Films on DVD
  89. Ghost Toasties Part II
  90. Historical Romances I've read and loved
  91. Great Music accompanied by Oscar Peterson
  92. Star Trek Movies--Best to Worst
  93. Not too cool for school--movies about school
  94. Kojeve and the End of History; Primary &some Secondary Texts


Sunday, December 23, 2007

Amazon.com's Featured Geek Gifts

"Geek" was once a pejorative, but with internet start-ups selling for billions of dollars it now seems that everyone wants to get into the act. Here are some of Amazon.com's picks for geeks and geek wanna-bes, possibly approved by über-geek Jeff Bezos himself.

Amazon.com publishes a series of gift guides, which change over time and may even disappear altogether. These snapshots are an excellent indication of what products are popular on any given day. While the content of the guide may vary, these Gifts for geeks should be around for a long time...

  1. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
  2. Marry Me
  3. The Ghost Brigades (Sci Fi Essential Books)
  4. Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.5 (Episodes 10-20)
  5. The Marvel Encyclopedia
  6. PlayStation 3 40GB Spider-Man Movie Pack
  7. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories Boxed Set (Kingdom Hearts (Graphic Novels))
  8. Mass Effect
  9. The Essential Guide to Alien Species (Star Wars)
  10. Penny Arcade Volume 4: Birds Are Weird (Penny Arcade)
  11. Leatherman 830039 New Wave Multitool with Leather Sheath
  12. Serenity (Widescreen Edition)
  13. Fawlty Towers - The Complete Series
  14. Final Fantasy XI Online: Wings of the Goddess Expansion Pack
  15. Crysis
  16. Mattel Magic 8 Ball
  17. 300
  18. Nerdcore Rising
  19. The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. - The Complete Series
  20. Ghost in the Shell SAC Complete Collection Box Set
  21. World of Warcraft 60 Day Pre-Paid Time Card
  22. Planet of the Apes - The Ultimate DVD Collection
  23. Logitech MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse
  24. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
  25. Atari: The 80 Classic Games in One (Jewel Case)
  26. Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 12
  27. J.R.R. Tolkien Boxed Set (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings)
  28. Logitech Harmony 880 Advanced Universal Remote Control
  29. The Ed Wood Box (Glen or Glenda / Jail Bait / Bride of the Monster / Plan 9 from Outer Space / Night of the Ghouls / The Haunted World of Ed Wood)
  30. Dune (Extended Edition)
  31. Sling Media Slingbox PRO (SB200-100)
  32. Hacking Firefox: More Than 150 Hacks, Mods, and Customizations (ExtremeTech)
  33. Doctor Who - The Key to Time Collection
  34. Arrested Development - The Complete Series (Seasons 1, 2, 3)
  35. The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-Ton Megaset
  36. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All (Popular Culture and Philosophy)
  37. Only Revolutions: A Novel
  38. Star Trek The Original Series - The Complete First Season
  39. Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (Hacks)
  40. Power Sentry 5-Outlet PowerSquid Power Multiplier
  41. How To Draw Manga Volume 26: Making Anime (How to Draw Manga)
  42. Star Trek: Music From The Original Television Soundtracks, Volumes One, Two And Three
  43. How to Do Everything with Your TiVo (How to Do Everything)
  44. Super Mario Galaxy

Featured Brands

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Amazon.com's Featured Gifts: Teenage Boys

Amazon.com publishes a series of gift guides, which change over time and may even disappear altogether. These snapshots are an excellent indication of what products are popular on any given day. While the content of the guide may vary, these Gifts for Teenage Boys should be around for a long time...

  1. PlayStation 3 80GB Motorstorm Pack
  2. The Simpsons - The Complete Tenth Season
  3. Apple 8 GB iPod nano AAC/MP3 Player Black (3rd Generation)
  4. The Official SAT Study Guide
  5. Spider-Man 3 (Widescreen Edition)
  6. Thames & Kosmos Microcontroller Computer Systems Engineering Kit
  7. Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 QuietPoint Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones
  8. Xbox 360 Console Halo 3 Special Edition (with HDMI)
  9. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
  10. Wild Planet Spy Video Car
  11. Bell Influx Bike Helmet
  12. SYNERGY from SwissGear by Wenger Computer Backpack
  13. Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (White)
  14. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
  15. Canon PowerShot A570IS 7.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
  16. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
  17. Amazing Spider-Man Complete Comic Book Collection Win/Mac
  18. Toysmith Professional Car Designer Kit
  19. Fullmetal Alchemist The Movie - The Conqueror of Shamballa (Limited Edition)
  20. Saitek X52 Flight Control System
  21. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Signature Series Guide (Bradygames Signature Series)
  22. Playstation 2 Silver Console
  23. Sony Cybershot DSCW80 7.2MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom and Super Steady Shot (Silver)
  24. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
  25. James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 1 (The Man with the Golden Gun / Goldfinger / The World Is Not Enough / Diamonds Are Forever / The Living Daylights)
  26. Mayfair The Settlers of Catan Board Game
  27. Sports Illustrated [1-year Subscription]
  28. Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron
  29. Wilson F1100 Official NFL Game Football
  30. Spalding 64-460 Spalding NBA All Conference Basketball (Official Size)
  31. Panasonic DVD-LS80 8.5" Portable DVD Player
  32. Skate
  33. GMC Denali XL Road Bike (22.5"/57.5cm Frame)
  34. Path of Destruction: A Novel of the Old Republic (Star Wars: Darth Bane)
  35. U218 Singles
  36. Eragon / Eldest (Inheritance, Books 1 & 2)
  37. Men's Casio Diver's Watch
  38. Jam Sessions

Featured Brands