More than just another cute neologism, Amazon’s newly released plogs (which stands for personalized web log, as if we needed a new word for personally aggregated content…) is an interesting marketing and promotional tool. In a nutshell, an Amazon customer who has turned on the service sees weblog entries from authors of books that customer has purchased. Messages you’ve read disappear (you can recall them at the author’s Amazon blog). And each entry in your plog has a permalink so you can share it with your friends (and potential Amazon customers).
I suspect a clever programmer could use existing RSS feeds from authors’ blogs (for those authors who have blogs on the public Internet) and add recent entries to an author display from the catalog. Probably only best sellers and authors with good marketing teams behind them have their own blogs, but it could be an interesting start.
Amazon’s Plogs
[Via LISNews.]