I see that Amazon.com has now adopted something called a “plog®.” The “plog” is apparently yet another marketing scheme, although Amazon touts it as:

a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.

This sort of thing, while inevitable (proving once again the truth that the blog is not going away, though it may mutate into innumerable obnoxious forms and hybrids), is undeniably annoying. For one thing, while the website invites you to go to Your Account to “change Plog settings,” the only option actually available to you is to “hide purchase details” (which doesn’t really seem to “hide” anything at all), not to remove the “plog” from your front page. For another thing, who’s writing this “diary of events,” and what kind of “events” are they? And what does “plog” even stand for? Yuck.