During the summit of the Americas last weekend Hugo Chavez walked over to Barack Obama, shook hands with him and presented the president of the US with a copy of “Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina” by Eduardo Galeano, a journalist from Uruguay. The book is a politically influential text written in 1971 which critiques the colonisation of Latin America by countries such as the US. It’s full title in English is The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

Photo’s of this flew round the internet. But equally significant – and a stroke of genius publicity by Chavez if he knew what he was doing – was the way that the book shot up the rankings at Amazon.com. It rose from #54,295 to #2 in the course of one day.

Which made me think of how to track this kind of information coming out of Amazon which could constitute very interesting data for social research. One method is to use http://rankforest.com/ a service that allows reader/authors to track one item for free. Here’s my tracking of The Open Veins of Latin America:

Interesting here are the number of rss feeds that are provided. Now if the library had such a fine grained tracking mechanism …
I’ll look at other services offering this kind of tracking/analytics for Amazon in the next few days.