Amazon a while back released something called yourmedialibrary. The idea is to have a repository for support information associated your Amazon purchases.

When they first released it, it only contained information on newly purchased items. Now however, they have updated it to include your purchase history. This means, for example, that you don’t have to dig up old product manuals anymore. Just click on the digital product manual stored on Amazon. In another area of yourmedialibrary Amazon stores all of the album art for CDs you have purchased. Neat.

You can access yourmedialibrary by clicking on the My Account link at the top of the Amazon homepage. From there just search for “media library” and you’ll find the link on the page.

Update: 2005-05-24
Seems that A9/Amazon has switched from Google to Microsoft search for their back end, so this feature no longer works, since they haven’t integrated Microsoft’s image search yet. However, you can add Flickr search results which — as noted below — works pretty well.

One reason why I use Amazon’s A9 search service is the ability to search websites side-by-side with images. Why is this useful?

To take an esoteric example, this morning I was looking for an image of the GEOS satellite-derived winds for the west coast of North America. This type of search is perfect for A9’s side-by-side feature. Entering in GOES HIGH DENSITY WINDS on A9, the following page is returned.

For me, it’s much easier just to scan down the image thumbnails on the right for the type of image I was looking for versus reading through the website links. In a couple of clicks I was able to find this page which is exactly what I wanted.

Of course, you could do this type of search using Google image search or Yahoo! image search, but I find that it’s handy to have both the website search and image search features side-by-side. The website links can be used as a fall back just in case you can’t find an image that matches.

I’d have to say that Yahoo! probably is in the best position to capitalize on this functionality, since they own Flickr. Flickr is obviously not so good at helping you find websites, but if you are interested in images of… bougainvillea, for example… they rock.

Zoinger says, search isn’t just about text.

I like Yahoo! Finance, but like so many other products on Yahoo! it looks so… NASCAR poster child. Friggin’ ads all over the place. Including the massive banner ad there are five ad units. That’s a lot of ads, but the biggest problem I have with the ads is their layout. It just looks like the ads were stuffed on the page randomly… it just looks plain fugly. Sort of like ’90s design meets 2001 Internet 1.0 crash bean counter looking for more revenue per page. Yahoo! needs to get in the way-back machine… back to the NASCAR of the ’70s.

But the worse thing about Yahoo! Finance is the complete disrespect for vertical space. I mean, look at the size of that banner ad — 230ish pixels tall!! Since you’re forced to scroll down the page just to see the content, ya might as well just put in a pop-up ad.

Of course, like a most of Yahoo!, there’s no new, cool technology like Ajax or Flash to make it more functional… pretty much just straight up HTML. Jeez, they can’t even set the focus on the “Get Quotes” box (at least they finally set it on the Yahoo! homepage). Not that you can’t make a highly usable HTML-only site, but this just leaves a big opening for your competitors to create a much more modern product… and they just have.

Enter Google Finance. It’s clean, modern and good looking. Even though Yahoo! Finance has a lot more content, I think Google’s got the 80% that counts — quotes and related news. Google is going to own this space soon, and Yahoo! is going to be the big looser.

Why is Google going to win? Well, it’s not product… it’s brand. Google has such a strong brand right now that they can win in market segments even with inferior products. When is the last time that you heard anyone talking about Yahoo! News… or worse yet, Yahoo! Search?

One wonders what the 9,800 Yahooers do at Yahoo! (employees numbers provided by Yahoo! Finance). Google is killing Yahoo! one knife cut at a time — Gmail, Google News, Google Finance, etc. — and Yahoo! is making it easy… they seem to be oblivious to product innovation. Tired products and a dramatically inferior brand do not make for success in my eyes. Perhaps someday, Yahoo! will wake up a realize this?

P.S. To be fair to Yahoo!, Google Finance doesn’t have any ads yet, which is obviously a big advantage. However, I doubt that Google Finance will ever look like a NASCAR poster child (not until the next Internet crash anyway).

Update: 2006-03-21
Just for fun, compare the search for “Yahoo” on Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance. Now, who gets it?

I stumbled across this graph on Macromedia’s site (aka, Adobe) today.

And this…

In September 2005, NPD Research conducted a study to determine what percentage of Web browsers have Macromedia Flash pre-installed. The results show that 97.3% of Web users can experience Macromedia Flash content without having to download and install a player.

I never knew that Flash was that ubiquitous. Amazing.

The porn and Viagra comment spammers seem to have given me a break lately. However, I occasionally see a more sophisticated form of comment spam such as this one left on my post entitled WSJ — The Art of Outsourcing…

Outsourcing is most common for companies whose IT needs are well known in advance. IT outsourcing can also mean hiring someone to be your IT department. Such a partner must have people who can work closely with your staff to understand your unique business problems so that you can deliver.

Ok, maybe it’s not that sophisticated of a comment, but it’s clearly spam whose aim is to direct traffic to the spammer’s site (in this case, an outsourcing company in India). And sorry, no link love for the spammer.

Zoinger says, hit the delete and buh bye comment spam.