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Comparing Amazon.com’s Social Interaction with Blogs

Comparing Amazon.com’s Social Interaction with Blogs

Bokardo looks at how social Amazon.com in an attempt to explain much about the social interaction of the modern web.

Bokardo features the following social points on Amazon.com via a graphic image, categorized by me:

  1. Ratings
    • Product Ratings
    • Rate this item
  2. Recommendations
    • Tell a friend
    • Add to Wish/Registry
    • Tag this item
    • Help others find this item
    • Offsite Reviews
    • Listmania
  3. Related Content
    • People who bought this also bought…
    • People who viewed this ended up buying this…
  4. Blog Statistics
    • Amazon sales rank
  5. Contributions
    • Share Product Images
    • Submit a product manual
    • Customer Reviews
    • Customer Discussions
    • So you’d like to…
  6. Let’s see how these line up with the features, interactivity, and social activities of a blog.

    Comparing Amazon.com’s Interactivity With Blogs

    Ratings: There are a variety of rating WordPress Plugins you can add to your WordPress blog which allows readers to rate posts, rate comments, and rate your entire blog if they want to. Comments, in and of themselves, are a way of adding “reviews” of your blog since they are part of the feedback feature of a blog.

    Most popular posts and comments are another rating system a blog employs to bring the highest “rated” content to the reader’s view.

    Recommendations: The strongest recommendation one blog can give another is to link and/or trackback to another blog from within a blog post. They can also use blogrolls and link lists to link to a blog and/or blog post. This is the equivalent of “telling a friend” and “helping others find this item”.

    There are also “tell a friend about this post” WordPress Plugins you can add to your blog which send a post link via email to the recipient of your choice.

    With most popular post lists, your readers are telling other readers of the posts they are currently visiting the most, thus recommending them.

    If you use a social bookmarking WordPress Plugin or links, you might also be encouraging your readers to recommend your blog post to others via their favorite social bookmarking services.

    Related Content: Matching one blog post with others of similar interest and subject matter offers the reader more options to find the information they seek. Related posts are a way of telling readers “people who bought this also bought”, connecting related content together.

    Blog Statistics: A blog can offer a variety of statistics which helps “recommend” and “review” the blog based upon assumptions made by those numbers. The number of visitors to your blog isn’t as trustworthy today as it once was, as this number can easily be faked, but it seems to be replaced recently by the page view statistics, the number of times a post has been viewed. The greater the number, comparatively, the more popular the post.

    Other statistics sometimes used by bloggers and their blog readers include subscription counters like newsletter or email subscription counts, Feedburner or FeedBlitz subscribers, as well as other feed stats, registered users count, comment counts, posts about how much money they made, and so on.

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    While sometimes overlooked as a statistic, lists of the most popular posts and comments provide a score card, too.

    Contributions: Blog comments are the most common form of contribution made on a blog, but some bloggers open up their blogs to multiple contributors, submitting posts, images, video, podcasts, and more in a variety of ways.

    Content often drives contributions from readers of a blog. Memes, contests, challenges, and other interactive concepts encourage contributions through comments, linking, trackbacks, and article contributions.

    Guest blogging is another way bloggers can contribute to other blogs, helping bloggers add to their blog content and build stronger relationships.

    I’ve only scratched the surface of some of the social interactions a blog offers compared to those found on Amazon.com. Do you see more?


    Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on and author of Blogging Tips, Tips Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

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