blam! has become a templating tool for writing reviews of (so far) books, CDs and DVDs.
You enter the ASIN/ISBN number of the item you're reviewing, then fill in the name and URL of your weblog, your Amazon associates ID if you have one, and your review.
blam! uses Amazon's web services to look up the metadata for that item, then produces the HTML you need to paste into your weblog, including an image of the item, referral links to Amazon, and metadata that will allow sites like allconsuming.net to pick up your review (like this one).
As an added bonus, your review will also be posted to blaxm! for anyone to read, where it will be organised by category so you can find other people writing about the same things as you. There are RSS feeds there as well, don't worry. Your associates ID will also be passed through to the blaxm! site, so you can get commission from referrals there.
You can launch this blam! bookmarklet from any book's Amazon page to begin writing your review.
Update: Fixed the bookmarklet so it launches from any Amazon book, CD or DVD page. Also it now opens from any page so you can add the ASIN number yourself.
Comments
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Right on dude. Mind publishing or making available teh data structure - sounds like a great place to start from!
What do these Reviews look like inside a blog post? Make sure you let Phil Pearson, Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower know what you're up to!
And Jon Udell, Anil and Seb - too!
Here's what a review looks like when copied and pasted from blam!:
http://www.pmbrowser.info/hublog/archives/000176.html
At the moment it uses a table for layout, but I'm thinking of ditching that and having the text flow around the image, or at least making it an option.
If I had an online niche bookstore around which I want to grow a community of readers/reviewers using a community blogging (c-blogging) platform like Scoop, could I use blam in conjunsction with?
Absolutely. I'm not sure about Scoop, but I know Drupal can use the Blogger API to receive posts - I've been using it myself here:
http://www.pmbrowser.info/drupal/index.php
Alf, nice work! I'll be using this in the future. I like your idea of transitioning from a table driven layout to one of image alignment. Kudos!
A nifty idea, though it would be handy if you could enable categorisation by subject as well as by medium (book/DVD etc).
Also, I couldn't get my MT automatic posting to work - does it require something later than MT v2.21?
Will be able to add categorisation by subject, as Amazon already gives out that data.
MT posting should work with earlier versions, but I can't say for sure. After a failed attempt to post via blam!, the resulting page should contain an error message which will hopefully indicate what went wrong.
Alf, blam! & blaxm! keep getting better and better. Thank you for all of your hard work. A request: I'd love to see a preview of my review before it is posted. ( More Kudos to you: The image alignment options work like a charm! )
Added a preview, although it doesn't take the image placement into account yet. Been meaning to do this for a while. Thanks to scriptygoddess - http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/001253.php - for the script.