Amazon (US) has just announced an "MP3 Clips Widget" (http://widgets.amazon.com/Amazon-MP3-Clips-Widget/):

Add music to your web site with the MP3 Clips widget. Search through Amazon's catalog of DRM-free MP3 music and addentire albums or select specific MP3 tracks to add to your widget. You can also showcase the latest Bestsellers from any musicgenre. If that isn't enough, your MP3 Clips widget can also automatically display the latest MP3 tracks you purchase onAmazon.com

How we'd like to us this

Once upon a time - and probably soon again - Onaswarm had an "Ads" widget in the sidebar which displayed (amongst otherthings) a list of recently played MP3 tracks, as shared with us via Last.fm. Clicking on the MP3 track would bring the readerto Amazon.com where they could play MP3 samples - and potentially purchase the track. A win-win-win for everyone involved.Unfortunately, because of the extra a steps involved plus an off-site navigation, this feature was somewhat underutilized.

How it works

• go to the Amazon MP3 Clips Widget page
• enter a search for music, by album or song title (or anything). You can also select Best Sellers or Recently Purchased.
• a list of matching items appear, which you can add to the widget

This is all AJAX-y, so you're just working on one page. When you've selected all the items you want to appear on thewidget:

• click Next Step
• a widget size selector and interactive preview appear; the widget starts with the album cover displayed, clicking on this brings you down to the individual track level

If you're happy with your widget:

• click "Add to my web page"
• a popin appears with the appropriate OBJECT embed code, plus explanations of how to add it to many different blogging services

The Good

It's pretty cool, easy to use and works exactly as advertised. I could see this driving lots of MP3 sales to Amazon.

The Bad

You can't dynamically select what the widget is going to display, that is, you have to construct a widget for each set ofmusic you want to share. This makes it somewhat - well, totally - useless for the purpose we're outlining above. This would bemarginally tolerable if there was an API or something, but alas that option isn't there either.

The Ugly

The widget constructor doesn't work on Safari 3. It doesn't complain, it doesn't pop up errors, it just doesn't work.

If you're not logged in, it forgets all state after you do. Come on guys.

Amazon.com won't sell MP3s to Canadians.

Summing up

Nice, but needs a few minor UI tweaks. Desperately needs a way of dynamically constructing a widget at render time.

There's an interesting post on "CSS Toys" (hat tip: Ted Drake from Yahoo! posting on the Microformats mailing list) about how to "Add OpenSearch to your website".

If you're unfamiliar with OpenSearch, here's a quick blurb:

OpenSearch is a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results. Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch™ format. Other tools can then read those search results. For example, here is an aggregator that brings together search results from many websites:

 

This something I can see BlogMatrix doing in the near future, once all the other dust settles. 

This brought up the topic of hAtom (my contribution to the world of Microformats) and using this for encoding search results. Here's what I replied:

• according the article, Yahoo only returns its results in HTML, so
• we know HTML is good
• one could add an extra field to the OpenSearch XML (a description
• file about how your results are returned) indicating that the file is
• hAtom
• parties not understanding hAtom can just display HTML
• parties wating to understand hAtom can do it themselves or use a webservice
  

When I was at MashupCamp in February there was a guy from
A9/OpenSearch very interested in mashup type applications and
developer feedback so there's a door open for us.

I'll also note that his WordPress integration problem will probably go
away if we did this, as an independent XML-feed result will not have
to be returned;

Full disclosure: I got a nice Amazon A9 hat from the conference. If anyone knows his name, please let me know -- the early MashupCamp 1 Wiki information seems to have disappeared.