April 24, 2006
Customer Participation at Amazon.com
Ever since posting a quick review of the OU course catalogue (OU Course Catalogue Takes Lead from Amazon?) I've been meaning to have a scan through the Amazon.com site to have a look at their tags'n'wiki features.
As it's the (first) end of a long day (before the evening and midnight oil sessions begin:-( I thought I'd spend coffee time seeing just what they've been up to...here's what I found (using no page in particular):
Tags 
A typical implementation, it seems: tags may be public or private and used for personal, or shared/social, (re)discovery of an item. Tags can be used for pivot searching - finding items similar to one you have tagged in a particular way by means of looking at what else has been tagged the same way, defining persoanlly meaningful categories and so on. Tagged/bookmarked items can be used as an informal 'not quite Wish List', although it seems that [i]tems you tag will be used as sources from which to make personalized recommendations..
I'm not sure how useful these tags are, or whether tags would be appropriate in an OU setting if applied to courses/for course choice? Certainly they are useful within a course, when used to bookmark resources relevant to a course, but for course choice, (which is intended to be the focus of this comparison between Amazon and OU catalogues) I think not...
Wikis
Two types of wiki entry are supported: wiki term definitions, which are entries that may be relevant across a wide variety of product wiki entries - for example, author biographies or details of a publishing house; and product wiki entries, which are tied to a particular product.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of different versions of the same product (e.g. the same book with different ISBN numbers, or the same piece of music/opera performed by different people?).
From their advice, Amazon try to make it clear that they expect wiki entries to be a different sort of beast to customer reviews:
What Should You Put In A Wiki? Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read. You should put in relevant factual information that you believe will be of value to others who visit the page. A Wiki is not the place to express your opinion; that's what Customer Reviews and Customer Discussions are for. As always, please treat the Amazon community with respect by not writing inappropriate or off-topic comments.
Another point of difference between the wiki and customer review entries is the provision of a Wiki Search box, which "enables you to search inside Amazon Customer-edited wikis. Searches can be performed across all wikis, or across product wikis (wikis that appear in the product detail pages), or across wiki term definitions."
I'd be intrigued to see what sort of content might appear in a wiki associated with a particular course page in the course catalogue...
Product Forums/Customer Discussion
One customer participation service I hadn't picked up on from the blogosphere is Product Forums (which Amazon describe as Customer Discussions).
In the OU, we have hundreds - if not thousands - of internal forums (i.e. First Class conferences). Conferences associated with the majority - if not all - of running courses, are open only to students registered on those courses, but alumni conferences for particular courses are also popular, as historically were course choice conferences. With the increasing availability of public course comment, I'm not sure how the course choice confreences are faring now.
Just by the by, it's interesting to see what Amazon's user policy in terms of how who's allowed to use the forums:
Who can participate in discussions? Customers! Anyone who has purchased items from Amazon.com and is in good standing in the Amazon community can reply to an existing discussion or start a new one. All visitors to Amazon.com can read any current discussion.
So in OU terms, I guess this would be current and alumni students?
Summary
After this quick look through some of Amazon's community features that wrap product items, I'm not convinced that they'd be very useful in the context of the OU course catalogue. However, they may be appropriate for the OU library catalogue, or more likely the OCI (Open Content Initiative) repository, these features may be interesting, e.g. if 'learning objects' within the repository are treated in a similar way to Amazon catalogue items...
Posted by ajh59 at April 24, 2006 06:12 PM