ClickZ reports that Amazon will offer author blogs. TDavid points out that Amazon isn't explicitly calling this program blogs (it's called Amazon Connect), and their offering looks decidedly non-bloggish. If you look carefully at the image on Amazon Connect, you can see the term "Plog" used What on earth is a "Plog?"

Some of you may remember, way back in June of '04, Amazon came out with a thing called a Plog, a contraction of "Product Blog." It was simply a way for Amazon to post information about a specific product. It never really went anywhere, unless you count the fact that Amazon trademarked the term "plog," which resulted in their forcing an open source blogging tool, pLog, to change their name to LifeType.

So it appears that the Plog is back, as Amazon Connect. Now, I love Amazon, both as a site and as a company. If I had to pick a company to work for, I think Amazon would be top of the list. That being said, this is a pretty weak offering. There's so much potential here. I mean, imagine Amazon doing for authors what Myspace did for bands; I would imagine that the demographics of people who would be really interested in connecting with their favorite authors (probably age 28-65 professionals, with money) is foreign to the whole Myspace thing, so it's pretty much an untapped market that Amazon has a good hold on already. But it's a shame, as this offering allows for little to no interaction, community or anything. It looks like a way to subscribe to posts from your favorite authors...Hopefully it's a first step to something better.