On the heels of writing that last article, I found a copy of Amazon.com Mashups in the post.  The book was written by a friend of mine, Francis Shanahan, and the book also has a great chapter that covers the S3 service mentioned in my previous post.  From defining objects and buckets to building out working prototypes that interact with the S3 service, this chapter helps you get up and running with S3 in an hour, well worth the price of the book for that chapter alone (<$20 on Amazon).

Beyond S3, the book provides a good introduction to the concept of mashups, as well as hands on introductions to mashing up services from Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, and others. It also showcases some of Francis' mashup creations, which are cool in their own right (i.e. Zollage, Zuggest, RoboCast, etc.). 

I'd recommend checking out the book and his mashups.

The book can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Mashups-Francis-Shanahan/dp/0470097779/sr=8-1/qid=1167221205/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4399996-7228729?ie=UTF8&s=books

His site (and related mashups) here:

http://www.francisshanahan.com