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Amazon geek?

I’m pretty much an obsessed record collector. According to my record database, which is highly accurate, I have about 640 records in my shelf. Records are overly expensive in Finland, so I’m buying a lot of stuff from the Internet, especially Amazon.

But that’s not the complete story. I’ve rated pretty much every record, DVD and book I own, on Amazon.co.uk. That’s a few items over 500 (on Amazon.com, I have about half of that). Naturally Amazon doesn’t have all the Finnish music I’m into, which explains the ever so low number. Even that is not as far as it goes. I have about 13750 (5500 on .com) items marked as not interested. You read it correctly, that’s almost fourteen thousand.

I visit Amazon pretty much every day, and immediately mark any new items I won’t be buying, from Today’s Recommendations, All Recommendations and those Recommended by Browsing History. Usually this isn’t a big amount of clicks, but pretty much every time I add a new item to my Amazon owned list, I’m gonna do more work. And every time I browse at any item on Amazon; .co.uk or .com – I do them both. At the end of the day, I usually have at most 5 items that I’m not going to mark, which means I’ll buy them at some point. At the moment I’m recommended 1-3 items, depending a bit on the day.

Some of the Amazon recommends are still silly; why would I be interested in a coffee machine if I’ve rated a board game? Some of the recommends are pretty good, and I’m recommended almost every new record/item I’m going to buy anyway plus some records, which sometimes raise my interest. All in all, it’s a pretty useful tool for me, also considering I buy a big proportion of my music from Amazon because of their and/or the Marketplace sellers’ low prices.

Sometimes I still wonder though – am I too much into Amazon? Should one really be using the Amazon recommendation system this much? How many marked items do you have?

New Ubuntu branding

It’s public! Today Canonical published the new branding for Ubuntu. The brand is based on the idea of “light“, and is reflecting the four key brand values in the Ubuntu project; precision, reliability, collaboration and freedom. To learn and see more of the branding, head to the new brand wiki page.

As the Xubuntu Marketing Lead I was invited to a meeting with the design team and some key members of the community at Canonical offices in London. We got to see the new branding stuff already in Monday, and the new stuff is pretty much exciting. I had a great time there and got to meet nice people from the community, with whom we discussed the new brand and how it could be incorporated into the community efforts, such like Xubuntu or the forums. Thank you Mark, Iain and all of you who were there!

As you can see on the wiki page, we’ve already produced a draft of the new Xubuntu logo as well as a draft for our new website. You can start seeing the new logo on daily images anytime soon, and we’re working hard to get the new Xubuntu website published well before the Lucid release.

Feel free to browse the wiki page and see the new branding yourself. More news on refreshing the Xubuntu branding, artwork and website to come.