Amazon's Tool Time

I was looking through Amazon.com last night and ran across of interesting tools they've developed to help sell merchandise through associated web sites and blogs that seem interesting.

One is the concept of a easily configurable, associate-built e-store that Amazon, being Amazon, had to call an aStore. I put together a quick but functioning aStore; test it out, and let me know what you think about the functionality. As a techie with web usability experience, I find this stuff interesting.

The other concoction is a new "smart" ad-serving software program called Omakase, which is Japanese for "leave it up to us."

I'm not about to start dumping ads in my content, but thought it might be interesting to see what kind of ads that Omakase might dig up for Confederate Yankee.