The Amazon RSS feed has been noted widely. Here is the Loosely Coupled story:
The other thing that’s interesting is that this is the first mainstream example of a retailer using RSS to disseminate its product catalog. Every item in those feeds carries a price, with a direct link to a page offering the product for sale. That’s qualitatively different from the mainstream uses of RSS that have been seen in the past, almost all of them devoted to disseminating information and signally lacking a revenue model. Amazon’s embracing of this new medium � reaching out to deliver filtered excerpts from its catalog to a fast-growing marketplace of RSS readers � is characteristically original in its thinking. Where Amazon leads, other online retailers would be well advised to follow. [Amazon commercializes RSS – Loosely Coupled weblog, Mar 5th 2004 10:28pm]
