Amazon have added support for their Video On Demand services in the Associates program, being their affiliate solution as you probably know by now. Here’s the core of it:

Take advantage of the launch of this popular new Amazon movie & TV streaming service and earn a 10% referral fee on all movies, TV seasons, and TV episodes such as The Office, House and Law & Order. Leverage Amazon Video On Demand’s Preview Player widget and add movie trailers to your site. Hit movies and top TV episodes are among the most compelling forms of video on the web with the highest conversion rates.

Although it isn’t mentioned in the post, you should probably remember that TV shows and movies won’t be available globally. Sign in to Associates to learn more.

Amazon has purchased book sharing startup Shelfari according to posts by Read/Write Web and TechCrunch last night.

The startup, which has one of the most interesting & funky user interfaces I’ve ever seen, is essentially a social networking & book sharing system for those that love to read.. like me!

Shelfari’s team makes the formal announcement on their blog:

We’ve got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon’s expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you’ll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site.

Paul Stamatiou has written a great post on ‘How to Live the Cloud Life’.

Paul outlines how to use cloud computing for several different things - ranging from E-mail (gmail), to storage (Amazon S3), to documents (Google Docs), and others.

As Paul writes in his intro:

There’s no doubt about it, I’m in love with the cloud. Some people might not share my fascination with storage-in-the-cloud and compute-in-the-cloud models but I can’t wait to have the same computing experience regardless of the computer or device I’m using to connect to the Internet. I’ve taken it upon myself to change my workflow and digital lifestyle to get as much of my data online and make use of web-based tools until that utopian time comes. Here’s how I do it and you can do the same.

Well worth the read…

Amazon has launched a brand new widget in their Associates program, something that hardly qualifies as news by itself. This one is a bit interesting though, as it not only pushes relevant (?) products on Amazon, but also related content on your very own site. That is interesting, since it means that Amazon would have to analyze your content to make any kind of decent recommendations. The launch posts doesn’t give us much more than that, other than a dummy image, but Amazon affiliates can login and give it a go themselves. Have you used this widget? Share your experience in the comments!

Amazon’s hosting service, S3, had a massive outage just recently, which in turn had an impact on a lot of web services. The service is usually used to store static stuff like avatar images and such, which means that Twitter was pretty ugly using apps like Twhirl during the outage. Everything is supposed to be back up now.
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Amazon just released a MP3 widget featuring samples from selected music from their MP3 store, with buy buttons. That means money for you, since it’s an Amazon Associates thing. A must for music bloggers perhaps? That is, assuming you operate in an area where you can shop music from Amazon. That doesn’t include Europe, I’m afraid, it’s US (and maybe Canada?) only.

Amazon’s got a new policy for POD, short for print-on-demand, publishers: Get with the BookSurge program, or the buy button goes. BookSurge is basically Amazon’s own POD operation, so they want all publishers to move over there.

This is quite a story, complicated and somewhat crazy. It’s about a company using its monopoly to make more money.

If you’re the least interested in publishing, head over to the excellent WritersWeekly and read the full story. Then check out Amazon’s reply, and the WSJ story that started it all (requires login).

You’ve probably read all about Amazon’s e-book reader, the one called Kindle. It’s a nifty little toy with an e-ink screen (no colors), straining the eyes as little as possible. Lots of people are pouring positive PR on it over at Amazon’s Kindle site, in non-embeddable videos (bad Amazon, bad!).

I’m torn about the Kindle. Read more about that over at my blog if you like. This post is about something else.

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