May 07
RSS web feeds for tags at Amazon.com
Amazon's Customer Communities team has rolled out much broader support for RSS in the form of tag-based RSS feeds. This new functionality has been soft-launched and you'll start to see those little RSS icons popping up on a variety of pages in the coming weeks. Here's the full scoop, pulled from the RSS help page on Amazon.com at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/rss-help.html. Take a look, and then drop a comment if there is some other type of content on Amazon that you'd like to be able to get a feed for.
RSS web feeds for tags at Amazon.com
(What are tags?)
What are RSS web feeds?
Often described as "Really Simple Syndication," RSS web feeds are a way to surface content from Amazon.com on other sites. You can also aggregate Amazon.com web feeds directly in a news reader, letting you receive updates in your personal reader without having to visit the site. Subscribing to an RSS web feed is usually as simple as clicking on the link or dragging it to your feed reader of choice.
On most tag pages you will see an orange icon (
) and the label "RSS feed". This web feed icon indicates that you can subscribe to and keep track of new products added to the tag or new discussions posted in the community. Ways you can make use of tag RSS feeds:
- Subscribe to feeds such as quilting or murder mystery, to learn of new products related to your interests, hobbies, or favorite authors as soon as other customers suggest them
- Embed a widget on your own website to automatically show the most popular products for a tag, such aswii games, and earn referral credit through theAssociates program
- Create a special tag for your book or movie club and provide a feed of recommendations to your members
- Export all your products and tags into another application or create your own web 2.0 mashup
Sample tag-based RSS web feeds
Advanced options for developers
If you'd like to use these feeds as data sources for other applications, it might be helpful to have some extra control over the content. These options can be appended to the query string of our RSS feed URLs, like amazon.com/rss/tag/blu-ray/new?length=100.
| length
| (All feeds)
| This parameter simply specifies how many items to get. The default for all feeds is 20 items.
|
| threshold
| (Recently tagged)
| This parameter indicates a threshold for how many times an item must have been tagged in order to appear in the "recent" feed. If the threshold is set to 5, items will not appear in the recency feed until they've been tagged 5 times, and will be bumped up every time they're tagged after that. The default value is 2. |
If you would like to discuss additional feeds, features, or parameters which would make it easier for you to use our RSS feeds, let us know! Questions and feedback about tags, RSS, and web services are welcome in the
Amazon Mashups Forum.
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