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
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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:





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Friday, January 04, 2008

Cellphone Mania @ Amazon.com

Amazon.com unveiled it's latest upgrades to their aStore program a little late for Associates to take full advantage of the opportunity in time for the Christmas sales rush. Well, better late than never, I suppose. Anyway, the current expansion of our aStore offerings has been a little haphazard (skewed toward toys, for example). We're now trying to take a little more orderly approach.

Herewith is a more-or-less complete sitemap of our Cellphone Mania, which is a relatively small category (in terms of the number of subcategories -- there are LOTS of items!):





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Thursday, January 03, 2008

Amazon's Amazing Kindle Wireless Document Reader

Compared to the hoopla surrounding the release of Apple Computer's iPhone, Amazon.com's new Kindle Wireless Reading Device was virtually a non-event. Nonetheless, initial demand for this latest must-have geek accessory exceeded all expectations, creating a waiting list for the product that is only beginning to be addressed.

Browsing through Amazon's Kindle Store, you'll begin to see why. First, Amazon has partnered with Sprint to create their own Whispernet wireless telephone network which is free to Kindle owners. That feature alone allows the device to pay for itself in only a few months. On the other hand, you may prefer Using Kindle with Your Computer, saving a local copy of you digital content. Either way, your content remains accessible in Your Media Library, and you can always Manage Your Kindle Subscriptions online.

For a quick overview of the Kindle device itself, see the Kindle Photo Gallery and the brief (36 page) .pdf file About Your Kindle. For more details, you can download the Kindle User's Manual (92 pages) and Read the FAQ.

To support the growing Kindle community, I've created a new Kindle aStore. As with other digital content, you can't order Kindle books directly from aStore sites, but it provides a useful alternative to Amazon's main site for rapidly searching and browsing Kindle content without the clutter found on Amazon's main site pages, and can be viewed directly on your Kindle. From Kindle Mania, you can easily link to whatever main site page you like for more complete information, or to order. Here are our top-level categories:

Kindle Mania aStore





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