It seems that Ama­zon has lis­tened to their cus­tomers’ feed­back. They cre­ated a great microsite, kindle.amazon.com, for man­ag­ing your Kindle’s notes and high­lights. On this site you can:

1. View a list of all books you pur­chased from Amazon.com for your Kindle
2. Review all notes and high­lights for books pur­chased from Ama­zon. Note that you will not see notes for con­tent that you have added man­u­ally via usb :(
3. Rate all of your books
4. See user com­ments and other details

Here is the email announc­ing the microsite:

Our cus­tomers have told us that they love being able to add high­lights and notes to their Kin­dle books. We want to make it pos­si­ble for you to access your high­lights and notes directly from a Web browser too. So we’ve released http://kindle.amazon.com, an online tool that enables you to do just that.

To try it out, go to http://kindle.amazon.com, sign in with your Ama­zon account, and sim­ply select one of your books where you have added high­lights or notes.

We hope you enjoy this new fea­ture. If you have feed­back please send it to us at amazonkindle-feedback@amazon.com.

The Ama­zon Kin­dle Team

Here’s a few screen­shots of the site:

A microsite for the Ama­zon Kin­dle that shows all your notes and highlights

Detail of a book’s notes and high­lights in the Ama­zon Kin­dle microsite

Ama­zon notes that if the site is miss­ing notes or high­lights that you know you have made then do the fol­low­ing on your Kindle:

These are the high­lights or notes that you added to this book. If you added high­lights or notes and you don’t see them here, then do the following:

If you have a Kin­dle (1^st Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Check for New Items”.

If you have a Kin­dle (2^nd Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Sync & Check for Items”.

Humor works. Humor + Neg­a­tiv­ity works even bet­ter. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will cer­tainly not become viral, I have been study­ing viral mar­ket­ing and wanted to share about a small exper­i­ment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Cre­at­ing Trig­gers that Get Mil­lions of Peo­ple to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Sto­ries (Kin­dle Edi­tion) in which the author states

It turns out peo­ple react to neg­a­tives. Sev­eral years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Exec­u­tives Only,” which gen­er­ated more traf­fic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are inter­est­ing, and peo­ple want to know what’s there.

This got my cre­ative juices flow­ing and I decided to exper­i­ment. Con­tin­u­ing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an exam­ple of a blog­ger, Mark Hin­kle, who did a satir­i­cal arti­cle on Ubuntu. Just so hap­pens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by mak­ing a neg­a­tive arti­cle of “Top 10 Rea­sons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not seri­ous at all, actu­ally it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily writ­ten, jot­ted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog nor­mally receives 200 vis­i­tors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 vis­i­tors. It had been picked up by a cou­ple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stum­bled, it was twit­tered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of suc­cess on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an arti­cle that I spent hours on.

I have been read­ing on my 6″ Ama­zon Kin­dle 2 for quite some time now and really enjoy it. But, as with all inno­va­tions that try to re-invent a tried-and-true prod­uct, it has its trade-offs. It does not com­pletely replace the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a real paper book. I thought it was about time we had some side-by-side shots — the same book in print and on the Kin­dle 2, so you can see the exact dif­fer­ences. The book is Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder (link to the Kin­dle edi­tion.)

Gallery

It is imme­di­ately appar­ent that a real book has more con­trast than the Kin­dle. And images are harder to view on the Kin­dle;  the 5^th image above, of the ship dia­gram, is almost unread­able on the Kindle.

Ways that the Kin­dle bet­ters the ordi­nary book

• Built in dictionary
• Search within books
• Search within notes and bookmarks
• Dynamic resiz­ing of the text size
• A whole library of books in one device

Ways that the ordi­nary book bet­ters the Kindle

• Con­trast
• Res­o­lu­tion (espe­cially images)
• Smell
• Typog­ra­phy
• Sense of which chap­ter your cur­rently in. On the Kin­dle there is no way to know which chap­ter your read­ing other than pag­ing for­ward to the next chap­ter or back­ward to the begin­ning of the cur­rent chap­ter. Books can place this info at the top of every page.
• Sense of loca­tion within the book. The progress bar below the text on the Kin­dle works ok, but it’s not nearly as good as page num­bers and the feel of the thick­ness of the pages before and after the open page.

Hav­ing recently pur­chased an Ama­zon Kin­dle 2 I am in the mar­ket for a jacket. I have spent alot of time research­ing and review­ing var­i­ous options and want to share my expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge so you can make a bet­ter buy­ing deci­sion. Today I am con­cen­trat­ing on the M-edge GO! Jacket for the Kin­dle 2.

Sum­mary of product

The M-edge GO! Jacket has a gen­uine leather exte­rior with a grey microfiber inte­rior. It is one of the most min­i­mal­is­tic jack­ets for the Kin­dle 2 — when closed it’s only 0.66 inches thick. It securely latches onto the Kin­dle and has a very soft inte­rior to pro­tect the screen from scratches.

It has no extra­ne­ous fea­tures (dis­trac­tions) such as pock­ets or straps. This is great for the Kin­dle user look­ing for a sim­ple & ele­gant pro­tec­tive cover. The front and back are made of high-quality, durable mate­ri­als. The cov­ers are very stiff, offer­ing great pro­tec­tion for the Kin­dle 2 screen. The microfiber inte­rior is incred­i­bly soft so there are no wor­ries about it scratch­ing the Kindle.

Per­haps the best fea­ture of this jacket is the way it attaches to the Kin­dle. It is the first third-party jacket I have seen that uti­lizes the Kindle’s built-in hinge mech­a­nism (see pic­tures below.) This makes for a very strong and secure attach­ment. Fur­ther­more, because of the outer-edge straps, it is more secure than Amazon’s offi­cial cover because your Kin­dle will not loosely flap around.

Details

The M-edge GO! Jacket is made of padded 100% gen­uine leather on the out­side with a very soft  microfiber ultra­suede inte­rior. It’s dimen­sions when closed are 8.25in. x 5.25in. x 0.66in. And it only weighs 7.2 oz so you will not notice much added weight.

Likes

• Access to all ports while closed
• Very low profile
• Qual­ity mate­ri­als and durable, trust­wor­thy construction
• Great pro­tec­tion for the Kin­dle screen

Dis­likes

• Ini­tially I wished for a strap to keep it closed (I am a fan of the Mole­sk­ine). How­ever, after using it for a few weeks I love it as is (so this isn’t really a dis­like after all.)

Opin­ion

This is one of the most min­i­mal­is­tic jack­ets for the Kin­dle 2. It has a sub­tle style and durable con­struc­tion you can trust in. It pro­tects the Kin­dle well and is easy to hold while read­ing. I highly rec­om­mend the M-edge GO! Jacket for the Kin­dle 2.

Too often we enjoy the com­fort of opin­ion with­out the dis­com­fort of thought — JFK

In a great state­ment my Eli­jah Cum­mings (via BBC) he explains exactly what the recent “bailouts” feel like to the gen­eral pub­lic. It’s funny. He is express­ing the out­rage the Sen­a­tors feel over AIG’s treat­ment of the “free” money they received. The gov­ern­ment, the very peo­ple who put this lame pro­gram in place, are get­ting a taste of their own med­i­cine. In a way I’m glad AIG did this to them. Cause it’s exactly what the gov­ern­ment did to us.

Demo­c­rat Eli­jah Cum­mings was equally incensed: “It’s like, OK, you got to help me screw you. And by the way I’m going to take your money and I’m going to slap you with it.”

In case you haven’t noticed, the econ­omy is really slow­ing down. The BBC says that in Jan­u­ary of 2009 there were only 477,000 new homes built in the US, the fewest in 50 years! At least Feb­ru­ary was better.

In Jan­u­ary, the annual rate to fell to 477,000 homes, the fewest in 50 years…The Jan­u­ary rate was the low­est since the US Com­merce Depart­ment started keep­ing records in 1959.

1. It’s too inex­pen­sive. In fact, pay­ing is only an option & I don’t feel com­pelled to pay for it. It’s just not as fun own­ing an oper­at­ing sys­tem I don’t have to pay for.
2. It’s too pretty. The abil­ity to apply any theme, or build my own, ruins my sense of cama­raderie with my fel­low OS users. Where’s the sense in com­plete personalization?
3. It’s too fun. Com­put­ers were never meant to be fun. When they become fun they become dangerous.
4. It’s updated too fre­quently. All those updates are just pesky. Do we really need the bleed­ing edge all the time?
5. The com­mu­nity is too active. They’re just too help­ful. I miss that sweet, sub­tle music while I’m on hold with tech sup­port in India.
6. There’s too much soft­ware to choose from. Who needs choices when I can just by the stuff rec­om­mended and pre-installed by the OEM?
7. The hard­ware it sup­ports is too mod­ern. It cre­ates that uncon­trol­lable urge to upgrade my hardware!
8. It does too much. If only my oper­at­ing sys­tem allowed me to do less, I’d feel less inclined to be pro­duc­tive with it.
9. It’s too friendly with other oper­at­ing sys­tems. I want my oper­at­ing sys­tem to play in its own sand­box with like minded kids. None of this shar­ing and mingling.
10. It’s too pro­duc­tive. Can’t I just have an excuse to play games?

A friend of mine wrote this awe­some post ask­ing the ques­tion “Why focus on space travel when we have so many con­cerns to address within our Earth Com­mu­nity?” Check out her post to see why :)