(no subject)

[which_chick]

I have been buying crap from amazon.com since October of 1996. I don't buy all my media there, but I buy a lot of stuff there. It is interesting to me that amazon.com has a record (browseable by me, even) of every single fucking thing I have ever bought from them, linked inextricably to my name and account.



Amazon has a level of detail regarding my buying history that didn't happen (at least not much, and certainly not on the low end of the consumption scale) prior to the internet age -- and it fascinates me. I guess if I were a conspiracy theorist or something, I would worry that people might be able to learn that I read a lot of Terry Pratchett or that I have purchased every dvd of Gundam Wing plus the OVA. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, much.

If it were me, I would be there playing with the database, that vast and seething mass of information, to see what was in there. That much data would be like a Lucky Dip at the local street festival. With the user base that they have, there at amazon.com, you could reach in and ask stuff like "How many of the people who have bought reggae music have also purchased a Ronco Turnip Twaddler?" and "Do the people who buy items to help with grilling also purchase arterial-spray horror movies?" With the help of the database, we'd get closer to seeing how many kinds of snowflakes there are, really. (Yes, yes. We are all individuals.)

The fun of having that much data to mine... you don't even *know* what kinds of interesting things you might be able to find out from it and the ease of use is just. Whoa. It kills me that it's so damn *easy*. Computers collect the data and database it (automatically via the sales system) and you're all set with a fucking huge amount of data laid out for your delectation, a veritable feast of a spread that you can plunder freely with assorted statistical tools. Seriously. Who wouldn't want that?.

The mental picture of lush plunderability that I keep getting here is 女体盛り. No, I'm not sure why my brain represents amazon's customer database as a living sushi platter. There's probably something very, very wrong with me.

Comments

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Were you looking at your order history, or the "your media library" thing under My Account? The Your Meda Library thing allows adding the stuff you didn't get from Amazon (it's a separate database), if you're feeling all completist.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I was looking at order history. There's a truckload of crap that I didn't get from amazon and I have no illusions about completist. That is clearly for the more organized among us.