One day I’ll write about how frustrating I find searching Amazon. It’ll be a bitter, gloomy post. Ingmar Bergman will turn it into a film. The climax will occur when I discover that Amazon has discontinued e-mail alerts for new products and I throw hummus all over my kitchen. Watch for it. In the meantime, I do have some good new for those of you who want to monitor Amazon for new products — RSS feeds for Amazon tags.

As announced on the Amazon Web Services blog, you can now build an RSS feed for tags. The blog post gives details about how the feeds are set up, but here’s a brief example:

http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/giraffe/new?length=100

Giraffe is the tag for which you’re searching. /new indicates that the search is for items newly tagged, and ?length is for indicating how many items you wish in the RSS feed. You can also add an associate tag to the feed, see the blog post for details.

It’s interesting to see what ends up tagged; it’s not items that have the tag in the title (necessarily). The RSS feed above generates items like the Paper Creations: Wild Animal Origami Book & Gift Set , which makes sense and Animals of the World 2.0 (CD-ROM) . There’s even a giraffe shaped like a rubber duck, which you would not, by its description (“Stretch – Rubber Duck by Rubba Ducks”) immediately recognize as giraffe-oriented.

I will be making use of this, though it’ll take some experimenting to find the best tags.

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