Yesterday Jeff Bezos spoke at the MIT Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference. Afterward, I recorded a short (12-minute) interview with him that's available here both as audio and as video. The subject of his talk and of our conversation was a trio of new Amazon services that I've explored quite a bit lately: S3, EC2, and MTurk.
At the end of our conversation I relayed a question that came up during my recent Superpatrons and superlibrarians talk at the University of Michigan. When I demonstrated the various ways in which LibraryLookup can disintermediate Amazon, somebody asked: "Does Amazon hate you?" It shouldn't, I replied, because although LibraryLookup clearly bypasses some purchases, it also invites people to engage with Amazon.com more than they otherwise might. As it turns out, that's just how Jeff Bezos sees it. During his talk he used a key term of blogging art: flow. When library patrons use Amazon's catalog to research what's in the library, they're creating flow through Amazon's site, and Bezos says he's all for that.
Update: As per this comment, you can hear the entire Jeff Bezos talk that preceded this interview, and you can also watch a video summary.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/09/28.html#a1533