Do Not Want

Thursday January 31, 2008
I do not want a book called "The Ghost Brigades", but someone thought I did, for a minute.  Those of you following this via my Blendix activity page will know what I mean.

One of the interesting things about working on Blendix is that we get to see all the ways in which other services export bad data.  Amazon is particularly weird about it, though.  As we were testing our code we saw a variety of bits of bad data intermittently published, some of which were fusions of the names of random products, some of which were actual products that had nothing to do with the user in question.  I'm a little sad that my first bogus entry was a real product, though.  Some of the incorrect entries we saw during testing were pretty hilarious.

Has anyone else out there used to using Amazon's various APIs to pull wishlist data and seen similar results?  Is there any way to work around it, or to recognize the bogus data?  Advice is welcome.