Amazon.com: Amazon has …

Amazon.com: Amazon has signed up yet another e-tailer, this time VirginMega, the online operations of Virgin Megastores. I think Amazon serving as the fulfillment hub for online stores is a good idea. The only thing I don’t like about it is that Amazon has yet to solve the problem of co-branding, or allowing a secondary brand to live co-dependently alongside the Amazon brand without brand confusion. This is what happened to Borders.com, my former employer. If you go to Borders.com you now get a page that looks and behaves just like Amazon.com. Of course, there is a small Borders logo on top of the page but it looks like an ad banner (this is not branding). The millions of dollars that Borders spends on branding and advertising each year is completely lost because Amazon’s back-end cannot yet handle parsing out page templates that can accommodate a different brand. This is also true for Toys “R” Us, another site that has opted to use Amazon’s fulfillment and e-commerce services.

Smoking Kills: I’d heard that Dave Winer was in the hospital but refrained from saying anything publicly, until now. I’ve met Dave a couple of times and he’s a nice guy, if a bit opinionated at times. Without anyone telling me, I knew that Dave was in the hospital for heart problems simply because I recognized his lifestyle and knew that his years of chain-smoking had caught up to him. I recognized it because that’s what killed my father, who I lost when I was twelve years old. My father was a very gifted teacher and had a way of reaching his students through example. Years later I am in contact (through the miracle of email) with my grade school classmates who were under my father’s tutelage and they all say the same thing “Your dad was the best teacher I ever had.” It’s been over seventeen years since he passed away but I realize now that my father left us with his greatest life lesson of them all: too much smoking will kill you.

NY Times: Smoking Looks Even Worse. “The new analysis provides added reason to ban smoking from public places and workplaces around the world.”

Jeez, spammers will say just about anything to try and rip you off. This one is an email pretending to be an organization to help combat “prison slavery”. What a scam. Sheesh.

The good news is that I’m keeping busy. The bad news is that I don’t have the time to keep up with reading industry mailing lists. WebDesign-L has over 2000 unread messages and CSS-Discuss boasts a massive 7030 7035 unread messages. If you’d all please just stop posting to lists for a while, I can catch up. Thank you.

I completely missed the news that Ann Landers died last Friday. You done good Eppie (her real name). May your legacy prevail.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at June 24, 2002 07:13 PM

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