As part of our effort to help VideoSift survive and thrive, we've created a way for people to link to Amazon items that are related to a particular post.

Use it when there is something that you'd like to recommend to other Sifters- music, movies, books or other products.

It works like this- find an Amazon product that relates to a particular video post and invoke it in a VideoSift comment thusly (for example):
*amazon=http://www.amazon.com/Sparrow-Mary-Doria-Russell/dp/0449912558

Amazon makes pretty ugly URLs, but don't worry - your invocation comment will be whisked away to the top of the post and converted to a thumbnail and link for the particular product.

VideoSift gets a little dosh for every purchase made through the link - so it's a great way to support the community and possibly find something good. You can see what it looks like on this blog post here.

Some other things to note:

- The *amazon invocation is available from the rank of silver star.

- multiple *amazon invocations may be used on a single post.

- *amazon works on video, sift talk, poll, and blog posts

- make sure that the Amazon link is related to either the post topic or a discussion that's happening in the post

- don't put anything else in the comment, or it won't work

- do not assign any product that is inappropriate for the post or your *amazon privileges may be revoked

[EDIT]
We just added a new post listing of any type of post that has any Amazon items associated with it. You can find it here: http://amazon.videosift.com We figured some people might be interested in seeing what items have been associated with what posts.