Friday Links: amazonfail, Domino’s, and a little bit of fun

• #amazonfail: If you were like me, you returned from a holiday dinner with family Sunday night to discover a storm of controversy brewing around venerated online bookstore Amazon. It seems Amazon was accused on Sunday of removing books with gay, lesbian, or transgender subject matter from their sales rank. What followed was a barrage of tweets and blog posts accusing Amazon of homophobia and calls to boycott. It was a display of groupthink that is both impressive and terrifying. As the work week dawned it came to light that maybe Amazon really did have a glitch in their system. Maybe this was all a stupid, ill-thought-out accident of technology. For more on how all this happened read Clay Shirky’s The Failure of #amazonfail.
• Domino’s: Lucky for Amazon they weren’t in the spotlight all that long. On Monday, a video hit YouTube featuring two Domino’s employees farting on salami and sticking pieces of cheese up their nose, then using that stuff to make a sandwich. Yeah. By Wednesday the video had been seen by half a million people and prompted the president of Domino’s to post his own YouTube video and the two people featured in the original video were arrested.
• Finally, let’s lighten things up a bit with a beautifully illustrated (though I haven’t figured out how to play it yet) flash game called Scarygirl
• Also, in case you missed it here’s Skimmer on WCCO