Amazon.com test, or was I just seeing things? Yesterday I blogged what I thought was an apparent redesign of Amazon.com’s product page. Fortunately, I screen-grabbed what I saw then, because tonight I can’t replicate the same results. Yesterday, this URL resulted in what this screen grab looks like. Here’s a screen grab of what I get tonight. Perhaps Amazon.com was (is?) conducting some field research into how a new design might affect sales. For the record, I think the new design does a much better job at merchandising a book.

Shut-up juice: The USC rout of Oklahoma (it’s four minutes into the third quarter of the Orange Bowl and it’s 45-10, and I’m tuning out) is making me think Auburn is lucky the current BCS system exists. When I hear the Oklahoma or USC fight songs (and they’re both classics), I have flashbacks of Jim McKay or Curt Gowdy. Unfortunately, I can’t watch the Trojans without thinking of O.J. (someone I swore I’d forget). I guess it just goes with being my age.

Bring back Janet: I’m sure after that blow-out of a first half, I was the only viewer still watching the Orange Bowl half-time show and that, what?, goth-cheerleader thing that lip-syncing-challenged Ashlee Simpson was attempting. The song, called “La-La” has the repetitive line which she kept shouting: “You make me wanna…., You make me wanna…., You make me wanna….”

Puke, Ashlee. The next word is “puke.”

Alanched: That rant last night about Mark Cuban’s (my favorite billionare blogger) misguided call for canceling inauguration festivities spiked the traffic around here earlier today when Jeff Jarvis sent some link love my way (what’s that?, a buzzmalance?) and then, in one of those events that makes any blogger feel like Sally Fields receiving an Oscar, Glenn Reynolds “instalanched” me.

(Wow. Last year I was Farked, and now I’ve been instalanched. If only I could get that “why nothing will soon kill the iPod” post slashdotted and then I could retire. No way could I continue doing this weblog if it had more than seven readers.)

Magazine e-newsletter from Mediapost.com: Mediapost.com has launched a new weekly periodical-focused e-mail newsletter called Magazine Rack. The first issue, sent today, features a review of Martha Stewarts Living by Mediapost.com’s magazine-beat reporter, Michael Shields. Unless I missed it, there’s not a link to content of the newsletter on the Mediapost.com home page, however, I’m sure there will be soon as there’s a page for a similar newsletter called TV Watch. The newsletter is free for registered users.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for artistically jumping on this news (okay, it’s a lame reference to this, see Feb. 6).

Tsunami video bandwidth project: In response to bandwidth issues faced by those who are hosting video of the tsunami, the Media Bloggers Association has launched a “distributed content-broker” system called the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative.

Civil war averted: I just received a Google news alert (screen shot above) that contains two news items with the following headlines:

“Essence Magazine Declares War On Rap Sexism“

“Time Inc. to Buy Rest of Essence”

This got me to thinking that if TimeWarner hadn’t spun off Warner Music, they’d be declaring war on themselves today.

Cool stuff from search geeks: If I didn’t have an RSS feed from Tara Calishain’s ResearchBuzz, I wouldn’t know about ObjectGraph Dictionary (an online dictionary that works like Google Suggest), one of those online things you use once and wonder how you did things like that before. If I didn’t have an RSS feed from John Batelle’s Searchblog, I wouldn’t know that Answers.com has been launched by Gurunet, which is shedding its subscription model and is now free, sort of a front-end to something that foreshadowed the grassroots gathering of knowledge found in the wiki movement. Until now, Guru net was a “buy an answer” model (Google still has one of those buried somewhere).

Correction: politicizing tsunami response can be okay: Last night, I said I agreed with Jeff Jarvis (who has 63 comments on this post - I don’t think I have 63 comments on three-years of posts) that mixing tsunami relief with politics is wrong. However, I just got an e-mail from a highly political source that indicates to me that an extremely effective political fundrasing machine is in the process of being cranked up to support the efforts of former Presidents Clinton and Bush via the USA Freedom Corps. I guess the “powers that be” have decided to respond to the “cancel the inauguration crowd” with a massive display of bi-partisan-cause-related-check-gathering.

Co-ed still means what I thought, sorta: You may recall back last October when I blogged a vaporzine called Co-ed and highlighted this quote:

“There is no one magazine aimed at both sexes, written by students for students,” says publisher David Allen Liebler…. He adds that the magazine will also be available in a digital format through its Web site and will offer advertisers a chance to target the readership through events on campus and during spring break.”

I asked then if the term “Co-ed” implied that it was not being aimed at “both” sexes (Silly me, I thought with a name like that it would be for female students.) Someone, I won’t say, suggested that my understanding to the term “co-ed” was perhaps a display of my advancing age. Oh, wait. It was me who suggested that.

So, now that the magazine is on the newsstands (Paul Colford calls it, “a quarterly with a high testosterone level (that) targets men on campus”) the name makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense is that whole “we have no competition” fantasy on the part of its publishers.

Also on the college vaporzine front, Paul Colford mentions one called Cheat Sheet being developed by McNair Zimbalist (no relation to Steve, but the son of a well-known magazine executive and the grandson of Inspector Lewis Erskine, I mean, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.)

Programming note: Remember, I’m linking to a steady stream of magazine news at del.icio.us/rexblog. You can get an RSS feed to it at del.icio.us/rss/rexblog. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on my link blog: “Sports Illustrated searching for ’swimsuit apprentice‘ — Finally, a reality TV show I understand.

The free press: News that the NY Times is purchasing a 49% stake in Metro Boston, a free newspaper distributed to commuters, should help raise the spirits of the investors in the Nashville City Paper.