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Amazon should make it possible to link easily to individual posts in book- and product-review threads. Some of these review posts are great, easily the equivalent of high-end published reviews. Others are merely greatly entertaining. It isn’t currently possible to link to these posts except by linking to the poster’s “about me” page (which is cumbersome and not quite specific enough) or to a book’s main review page, which is almost useless for books that have lots of reviews. Real permalinks for individual reviews would have no downside for Amazon but would greatly facilitate the use of Amazon’s substantial online content in blog posts and other online publications. Whatever happened to “viral marketing”? Permalinks should be a natural for Amazon.

(Thanks to Val for sharing his Amazon knowledge.)

Disaster strikes in Chicago.

As she thanked the French for opposing conflict in Iraq, she told fans: “Here in France I feel at home.”

The world’s biggest computer and video games exposition E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) will be held May 14-16 in Los Angeles. GameSpot has a list of the games to be presented there in various stages of completion. That a game appears at the E3 doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be finished soon, though. Some of the best games around were notoriously shown at several consecutive E3s, like Warcraft III, Black & White and Freelancer (five years in development!), just to name a few.

According to the Microenterprise Journal women own nearly half of all American businesses. Even better, they grow and expand faster than the rest of the economy. That shows that they have a lot of as yet unrealized potential, so that this positive trend should continue for a while longer. Since this is the Microenterprise Journal, the article also makes these points:

… the vast majority of the revenues and the jobs are coming from relatively few of these firms. Of the 3.9 million privately held firms in which women own at least 50% interest, 166,212 have revenues of $1 million, and 6,902 have 100 or more employees. That doesn’t sound too bad until you crunch the numbers. Only 4.3% of these firms have revenues in excess of $1 million a year. A meager 0.2% have 100 or more employees. … … while it might sound impressive to talk about firms that generate millions and billions of dollars in revenue, the reality is that the world’s largest economy generally chugs along on the backs of a lot of little companies that make a lot less money.

That last point illustrates nicely why even the strongest economies are so vulnerable to increased regulations and taxes.