Stan Scott

Oh shit. Everyone do this. Results are downright scary. - Louis Simoneau

Holy crap. That's not cool at all. - Anika

Whoever thought this was a good idea needs a rude awakening. - Louis Simoneau

Here's a link of the search you can share: http://bit.ly/lirE - Anika

Follow-up, Amazon is now saying it was a "glitch" after spending all day telling customers it was a policy change. - Anika

THEY OWE ME A KINDLE FOR THIS. - Derrick

LOL @Derrick - Louis Simoneau

unbelievable... - Michael W. May

An update on Anika's last message. It was a policy change. Then it became a "glitch". Now it's a "ham-fisted cataloguing error". - Stan Scott

Um...if it was a glitch? why is the same search still returning the same results? - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ

wtf Amazon? Paging Jeff Bezos, paging Jeff Bezos. - Dave Hodson

From my possibly limited point of view, there hasn't been enough commentary and discussion for this week's phenomenon. There are probably private discussions and sites I'm not aware of, so this might be untrue, but yesterday, Jay Rosen (NYU) tweeted something to this effect (if I misunderstood, I apologize here to Mr. Rosen). - Stan Scott

Even the "guru" Clay Shirky, tweeted that he "came late to the party". But why wasn't there more? - Stan Scott

One factor is this: to many companies, the #amazonfail event will reflect very negatively on social media. This is unfair, of course, because Amazon so mishandled this whole affair. To me, #amazonfail stands for this: any company using social media has to support communication that goes both ways. If they don't, sites like Twitter and Facebook are just advertising/informational pages, and really no different from a company web page. A lot of the stuff I'm seeing on Facebook is nothing more than this. - Stan Scott

I question, though, whether a lot of companies, especially larger ones, are ready to do this. If you work for a lot of smaller companies, especially in tech, you'll certainly find open, friendly companies, that really do want to do this. But a lot of companies don't really want this, in my opinion. - Stan Scott

It's a valid question, though, as to whether, once Twitter sparked the change, it was productive through the week. Many people exchanged good information and links. There was also a great deal of emotional spewing, trolling and inadvertent miscommunication. The problem isn't that Twitter isn't "moderated" -- the problem, I think is that 140 character limitation. - Stan Scott

Twitter has proven to be great for getting people together to bring about change, but it's no place for reasoned discussion and full exchanges. Even if you want to do this, you just can't, using 140 character bursts. - Stan Scott

Other forms of social media, blogs, informational web sites, sites like this one, and mainstream media stepped forward. This is where the real fires are burning. - Stan Scott

One more thought. A lot of us thought that it was weird that after Shirky's article came out, a great number of people tweeted on this, using #amazonfail, who had never posted about it before. It's perfectly okay to do this, of course. I did find yesterday, however, a web page that was set up for one purpose -- to do a "Shirky" post to Twitter and a web site. An hour or so after I tweeted this, the page was gone. There were probably other sites like this. See next comment. - Stan Scott

Amazon explained that "it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica." Aren't these the areas that the religious right have been trying to interfere with for years now? - Stan Scott

If this were really a "cataloging error", why were all of the gay books delisted, but not the ANTI-gay books? Wouldn't they BOTH bear the label "Sexuality"? - Stan Scott