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May 3, 2004
Central opportunity
Central opportunity: Signals vs Noise had a long item about online catalog comparisons this weekend. The shopping sites often do a database dump to HTML of all fields for a selection of records, with the result that if you're comparing cameras that much of the display does not contain meaningful differences. Trying to customize this on the backend seems like it could be hard, because the typical catalog store carries lots and lots of different types of items. (ie, should they build special pages for camera comparisons, or should this be a general function also applied to camptent comparisons?) With trustable clientside tools like Central, though, it may be easier to make a comparison app, which can just highlight fields which have differences, or which can include or prioritize certain fields the tool's user finds most important (eg, "I want it to be lightweight most of all, and am then concerned about price and battery type.") Why not in a web page? Because for many items you reach a decision over a number of days, and it's easier to keep your prefs and data in one place on your own machine than to reconfigure prefs across a whole bunch of web pages for different sites in different sessions.
Posted by John Dowdell at May 3, 2004 2:30 PM