Another quick note: It's hard to coin a term these days.

Yesterday, in a story I wrote about Amazon's new "plog" service that eventually got killed, I thought I had come up with a great new term.

It was: "jumping on the blogwagon."

I was tres proud of myself. Until just now when I did a Google search on it, and found there were 954 results for it. Man!

Just goes to show...uh...something. Not sure what.

Hey? Have you forgotten Norway yet?

Saturday afternoon. Reagan just died. It's been a haiku fest on one of my email lists. There doesn't seem to be a lot of love lost for ol' Ronnie RayGun, and no wonder.

The man governed by fear. Dubya is his fault, if you think about it. We have him to thank for making Daddy VP, and without that, we'd never have to stomach the moron who lives in the White House these days.

Oh, well...I always wondered whose death would be bigger news: Reagan's or Sinatra's.

Of course, Sinatra's been gone for awhile now, and in the end, it wasn't a fair battle. That's because Sinatra chose the wrong day to croak: the same day as the Seinfeld finale. We found out then what really mattered. And RR passed on a Saturday, so he's not going to make huge news either. Funny how that turned out.

Anyway, on to some new links.

- My piece on Wi-Fi problems with XP keeps on getting the hits, and has made is to no. 7 (strike that, no. 6) on Blogdex today. That's pretty cool. As far as I know, my previous high was no. 9 with my story on Gmail Swap. I can't help being tempted to forward all the feedback emails I've gotten to the Microsoft PR guy who claimed that, essentially, we were making this stuff up. Pure Redmond denial nonsense. Give me a break.

- Over at the junction of blogosphere and Google, we find Anil Dash and many others vying for a mini iPod and a flat screen TV. All they have to do is find a way to be the top-rated google result for a previously zero-results term: "Nigritude Ultramarine."

I'm hoping to do a story on this contest, in which they'll give the iPod to the person whose site is number one on Monday, and then the TV to the person whose site is number one at the end of the month. I want to find out what the tricks are to making this happen. I'll post here later if I do a story on it.

- As many of you many know, I've been writing about virtual economies (such as those in There, Second Life, EverQuest and the like) for many months now. But now Reuters has weighed in with a story that's getting lots of play about the real estate boom in Second Life. It's been picked up all over the place, and while I'm happy that SL is getting the attention, I'm a little peeved, since I pitched that story a month or so ago, and my editor said he really wasn't interested. Ah, well...Can't win them all.

Since my Amazon plog story got killed, I thought maybe it should see the light of day anyway. And, guess what? I have an outlet for such a thing. Here!

So...for all you two readers out there, enjoy:

Amazon Jumps on Blog Bandwagon
By Daniel Terdiman

Blogs have been around for years, and are now starting to make their way into the mainstream. Both presidential candidates have them and Midwestern TV stations are running segments explaining to the masses about the "new" phenomenon.

So it should come as no surprise that Amazon.com has now decided to jump on the blogwagon; In this case, the online superbookseller has begun trying out a somewhat bloglike service it calls personalized blogs, or plogs.

"Amazon.com is beta testing a new feature to enhance the shopping experience by offering each customer their own personalized 'plog' on our gateway," said Craig Berman, Amazon's director of platform and technology communications.

He defined a plog as "a list of posts presented in reverse chronological order with information personally relevant to each user, including order updates, reminders and new product releases."

Some feel it's a natural for companies like Amazon and Nike to begin mining blogs for new ways to reach out to customers. After all, to most people outside the blogosphere, the medium is still a fresh way to communicate, and a way that conveys immediacy, relevance and a personal touch. The question, as always when corporate America gloms onto a cool trend, is whether it's good for blogging?

To its credit, Amazon isn't trying to pretend it invented blogs. On its "What is a plog?" page, it provides a brief explanation and a list of popular sites, including Boing Boing, Megnut, InstaPundit and others, that customers can visit to see what all the blogging hoopla is about.

"Certainly some of the sites they link to will see a jump in readers," says Nikolaus Ehm, a blogger who recently discovered his plog after years using Amazon. "I think it will make people feel more familiar with the look of blogs [and] one would hope that this will lead people to become interested in not just the big blogs, but possibly becoming bloggers themselves."

Of course, Amazon probably couldn't care less about that. To the bookseller, promoting plogs is solely about utilizing a format it thinks will make its service more useful to its customers.

"The goal of the plog service is to provide users with an easy way to keep current on events that are relevant to them," said Berman. "The service is designed to further enhance the customer experience by providing personalized information, including product recommendations, order updates and other Amazon.com content in one convenient location."

But not everyone is impressed with Amazon's bloglike interface.

"I was disappointed," said Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter, a popular community blog. "They had a lot of bloggers on their staff, and I figured if they ever did anything with [blogging] they would do something impressive. It just seemed like a silly co-opting of the format."

On the other hand, Ehm thinks that, for him at least, his plog is a lot more useful than the recommendations he used to get from Amazon.

"I like the look of their plog," he said. "It [is] a much cleaner way to present the information than their standard 'home' page on the site. I'm looking at the regular page…and it's just a mess."

Amazon has built a reputation for its ability to recommend products that its customers might buy based on past purchases. And leveraging that information and presenting it in a personalized way is what the company is trying to do with plogs.

But the blogosphere rewards ingenuity and cleverness, and for plogs to take off, Amazon might need the blessing of the very people it is attempting to imitate. And that might be hard if it doesn't find a way to make plogs a little less wooden.

"It barely resembles a weblog," saus Haughey. "It looks like a fake, bot-generated page that's formatted as if it was a weblog."

Berman pointed out that the plog service is in its earliest public phase and that the company plans to build it out over time.

But while Haughey lauded the way Amazon has for some time been using RSS feeds – a highly popular syndication tool in the blogosphere these days – as a way of pushing out product information, he wishes the company had made plogs more imaginative.

"If you compare it to something commercial like Nick Denton's new Nike Blog, that's a real blog," Haughey said, pointing to the Gawker Media founder's just announced project that incorporates Nike content with blogging posts about independent filmmaking. "It's not just some bot shitting out press releases."

Still, there's something to be said for companies like Amazon trying out new interfaces and new ways of presenting information. And if it doesn't work, the company can always drop the project.

But Ehm thinks Amazon is on to something.

"Hopefully, they do decide to [stay] with the plog system," he said. I think it's a much more aesthetically pleasing look for the home page….Some people will say that Amazon is just jumping aboard the blog bandwagon, but the traditional blog layout seems to work well for relaying a lot of information."

OK...

It's once again time to get Flap Flap Wiggle started again.

I think it's going to take a different form than in the past. I think I'm going to use it as a place to post my favorite links I find on other blogs, along with my own Wired News stories, and possibly some other silliness I might find elsewhere.

I'd love to post long, thoughtful missives. And I may occasionally. But I just find that the pressure to be clever, articulate and worldly on a regular basis - on top of my other writing - keeps me from posting at all.

So...stay tuned. Let's hope that FFW can indeed be a regular forum for the best the blogosphere has to offer.

- To begin: My piece on Wi-Fi problems associated with Windows XP. I'll just say that this piece got the most feedback of any article I've ever written. By far.

- VisitorVille. A gorgeous software package that offers a visual representation of website traffic in a SimCity-esque manner. New visitors arrive on buses with the logos of their referers (Google, Yahoo, etc.). Websites are buildings. Visitors can be clicked on, and their passport pops up and displays up to 20 pieces of information about them. Wonderful. My next Wired News story. Via Waxy.org/Links

- Iron Blog. Like Iron Chef, but for bloggers. Well-known, or at least somewhat well-known, bloggers come together to debate political issues. The blogosphere comments. The judges decide. Via Kathleen

- Pedals Around the Rose. A game. A mind-bender. The title of the game is important. Be nice to yourself and take your time. Don't give away the secret. Via MetaFilter.

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