I’m not a huge fan of rolling over links and getting some window jumping up (especially if they get in the way of the other content like these did) so I’m partially making this post here as an experimental test of Amazon’s new enhanced product previews and to see what readers think of these. The code to make these enhanced product previews appear is only in this post as of this writing and depending on how readers feel about them will determine if they are used again here.

Just so it’s clear we regularly shop online at Amazon and other etailers. One can get some pretty good deals there like that Quiet Riot CD I wrote about awhile back . In fact, about 95% of our holiday shopping was done online (not all with Amazon). Our household believes in buying online. After all, how can we expect to make money from online advertising if we don’t buy online?

Because this Amazon product information is about the products/services next to the link and not some giant half-page spanning spamatorial, I’m thinking it could be useful.

Are you seeing them when you mouse over the text links below?

Actually, there is only a 50% you’ll see these links, says Amazon:

To accurately evaluate product preview-enhanced link performance, 50% of the visitors to Web sites in the beta program will always see preview-enhanced Basic Display Product Links. The other 50% will always see standard links … If you are unable to see product previews on your own site, try clearing your amazon_vf cookie.

So there you have it, if you don’t see these enhanced displays when you hover over the links below then that’s what you need to do in order to activate it. One thing I do like is it doesn’t force readers to leave the site to see whether or not the Amazon price is a good deal or not.

Example links (actual music I’ve been listening to recently)
Seventh Star - the haunting tone of the song, “In Memory” will resonate. Yeah, it sucks that Ozzy isn’t singing on this one, but Iommi has some nice soloing on this CD.
Human Wheels - I like the title track, particularly the live version of this song.
Essential Ten Years After - Their song “I Love to Change the World” is great. If you can find the live version (not on this CD) there is a killer guitar solo.

(Note to other Amazon affililates who use Wordpress: definitely want to check out manalang’s WP-Amazon plugin. This will put a link in the posting area that you can click on, search for artist info, and then add to your post. Very handy!)

Now readers if you have a quick few seconds please use the comments below and tell me if you find these enhanced links potentially useful, intrusive or don’t care. Thank you for reading.

Update 10:47am PST: A couple of my friends had difficulty (and so did I) getting this to show up in Firefox. Look for dotted lines beneath the example links above. If you don’t see the dotted lines, you didn’t get the cookie and will need to reset and refresh the page. This is a really buggy way to release something, Amazon. If people put the code on a page, make sure it works 100% of the time.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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