When I logged into Amazon this morning, I was presented with my plog or personal weblog. I'd heard of the project during my last year at Amazon, though I never found out what it was all about.
It looks as if customer reviews for products have been turned into weblog posts so they can be served up as content using the old new release recommendations engine. The introduction also states that plogs will contain updates on the status of my previous orders.
I can't imagine that's all Amazon will do with plogs, knowing the people there. My guess is that soon all our customer reviews will be transformed into weblog posts, for those products without editorial reviews. Then they'll scrape public weblogs and load those posts into the recommendations engine to serve up as content to sell product, especially since so many weblogs are Amazon Associates. And, if they wanted to veer from pure product recommendations, they could simply load all weblog posts into its recommendations engine and create an automated blogroll using their similarities algorithms combined with web traffic analysis from Alexa or web structure data from Google. People who read this weblog also read these weblogs.
UPDATE: Just who owns the definition of plog, anyway? Others use the term plog to refer to project logs.