Amazon Tries Its Hand at Tagging

Kailash Nadh writes "Amazon has formed a 'tags team' and has begun using tags on some pages. The idea, apparently, is to slowly experiment with tags and to give users some power over how certain Amazon products - books, for example - are categorized." From the article: "Ultimately, this is interesting because it may well prove to be the most visible example of a company incorporating tags as a way to bring order to information. Outfits like Flickr are big and have tremendous followings, but nothing compared to Amazon's. And if Amazon can make a go of tagging, that may finally be the tipping point that makes the technology something every Tom, Dick and Harry knows about."

Comments

Cue the bad jokes about tagging

[Kelson]

Q: How can you tell a blonde has been shopping on Amazon using your computer?
A: There's spray paint on the screen.

Re:Cue the bad jokes about tagging

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll?

What, no one remembers the joke about the blnde with white-out on the screen?

Or no one remembers white-out?

Re:Cue the bad jokes about tagging

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... yeah. When I first read this comment I thought, "That's a weak joke". I sure didn't peg it for a troll though. Just a really poor attempt at humour.

Probably just a blonde moderator who's Aunt Flo is in town this week. Suggestion to mods; if it's not funny, (and this wasn't), just ignore it and move on to something more worthy.
--

Re:Cue the bad jokes about tagging

[wezzul]

No one remembers writing...

Series?

[TheRaven64]

One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series. If you've read book one, and want to buy books two and three, you generally have to look up the order elsewhere first. Hopefully people will start adding this information.

Re:Series?

[Kelson]

Sometimes it does. Or, more precisely, it'll say something like "This is the 2nd item in the XYZ series" under Product Details, and link to a series page. It's not quite a direct link to what's next, but it does tell you where it is in the sequence and direct you to a hub.

Re:Series?

[Monkelectric]

One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series.

The thing that irritates me about amazon are the constant price increases. I signed up for amazon prime and their f***ing prices keep going up. Its now actually cheaper for me to order music on bn.com and pay tax AND shipping than to order on amazon with my "free" amazon prime shippnig. *very pissed customer*

Re:Series?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series.

Actually, they do for most series. When you click on A Crown of Swords , for example, the book title says "(The Wheel of Time, Book 7)", and there's a link below saying "This is the 7th item in The Wheel of Time Series ".

By the way, it's interesting to see the first few series Amazon has (by changing the /2/ in the URL). One through four are fantasy; 5 and 6 are movie trilogies, #7 is the soundtracks from Dawson's Creek...!? There doesn't seem to be any ordering to this. #8 (surprisingly, not #1 or anything) is LoTR, and it takes until #40 to reach Discworld. Probably they just added series as they found them. It goes until rougly 904 (with a few gaps).

Re:Series?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I signed up for amazon prime and their f***ing prices keep going up.

Do you actually get any value out of it? Half the things I look at say, "this item is not available for Amazon Prime" which makes me think I'm better off without it.

Re:Series?

[Monkelectric]

Do you actually get any value out of it? Half the things I look at say, "this item is not available for Amazon Prime" which makes me think I'm better off without it.

Well, my original thought was this ... I work 50 - 60 hours a week, and commute about 15 - 20 hours a week. I am also very well paid for this, but it basically leaves me no free time whatsoever. I buy a LOT of albums (about 150 a quarter or so) because I listen to music all day at work, which has the effect of keeping me sane and therefore I consider the cost of these albums to be a business expense.

I buy perhaps 75% of the albums used, and ones I cant find used, I buy on amazon. In that regard, the amazon prime was awesome. I dont have to wait and make a big order of cds, I hear an album I like, I order it that very second, and it shows up in a day or to -- and I dont have time to go to the store anyways.

However now the service has gotten terrible on Amazon. Products are constantly shipped late, sometimes weeks late. Ive had albums mysteriously disappear off my orders and entirely off the amazon website. Add that to the fact that videogames don't qualify for prime, and the CD prices have been through the roof, and you basically I am pretty much done with amazon altogether.

Hmm

[pHatidic]

And if Amazon can make a go of tagging, that may finally be the tipping point that makes the technology something every Tom, Dick and Harry knows about.

And just wait until Dick looks up all the stuff people have tagged with his name.

Tags and REST

[leighklotz]

Maybe Amazon and Del.icio.us can get together and agree on a REST API for tags.

Re:Tags and REST

[Pollardito]

if i were Del.icio.us, i'm not sure i'd want to work on a project with them just to find out later that they'd patented it. i wouldn't be surprised to see a patent for the idea of tagging coming down the line from Amazon sometime in the near future.

Appeal to a bigger audience

[drakethegreat]

Its nice that the author assumes we know what tags are. It creates an article that only people who know whats going on already understand. Otherwise you go tag? What kind of tag?

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[ergo98]

Its nice that the author assumes we know what tags are. It creates an article that only people who know whats going on already understand. Otherwise you go tag? What kind of tag?

Parent Post Tags: clueless "karma whore" "obvious question" :-)

Seriously though, tags are user-provided categorization (including multiple "categorizations" given that you can apply multiple tags) of content. e.g. Search on Flickr for all photos that are in the union of the tags Toronto and Girl and you'll get photos that have those two tags. The same concept applies to delicious. This is the so-called folksonomy in action, where us lowly serfs categorization content, rather than "the man" in a taxonomy like Yahoo.

However the tag thing is going way too far (as are most "Web 2.0" things) - tags are useful in the absence of a superior classification system. For instance we tag photos in Flickr only because the system can't, thus far, determine what the photo is about mechanically. If it could automatically classify photos, then this folksonomy would prove terribly dated, unreliable, and inaccurate. Look at Google - what is better: The META keywords technique of before, or actually contextually placing each page based upon its actual content?

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[seathunter]

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags): "Tags are pieces of information separate from, but related to, an object. In the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords, tags are descriptors that individuals assign to objects."

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[Anonymous Coward]

When have tags previously been mentioned on Slashdot?

I think this is the first time I haven't known what people are talking about on Slashdot. As far as I could tell, this was about Amazon spray-painting gang signs to mark their territory.

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[Doppler00]

Speaking of Wiki's, how come no one has come with a Wikipedia equivalent of a website like Amazon.com? What if every product page was a wiki where customers could customize it for other customers? I think Amazon is missing out.

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[hazem]

I think Outlook2003 does some kind of tagging. It likes to underline words that it thinks are related to something else, providing a link to that something else. It's fucking irritating. I don't want formatting or links in my e-mails that I, or someone didn't intend to be there.

Even worse, I work in a division of a company that has the same name as a country. Every time our division name shows up, Outlook wants to send me off to links about the country - we don't even make our shit in that country.

I can't find a way to turn the fucker off anyway. In fact, the whole office 2003 migration has meant nothing but headaches and a lot more sitting around waiting for the computer to do stuff. ARGGHHH!

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[Anthony Boyd]

When have tags previously been mentioned on Slashdot?

Here and here at least. I found those pretty quickly just by searching for "flickr." If I expanded the search to the terms "tagging" & "folksonomies" I suspect I'd find more. Outside of Slashdot, there are a good number of magazine articles on it, too.

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words... keywords. Good to know of all this remarkable innovation that is taking place on the internet.

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[Anonymous Writer]

What if every product page was a wiki where customers could customize it for other customers? I think Amazon is missing out.

I heard a rumour that Amazon allegedly removes some negative comments about products in order to keep the inventory flowing. A wiki would probably make it harder for that kind of thing.

Re:Appeal to a bigger audience

[StikyPad]

You know.. tags. Those mostly unreadable spraypainted words that gangs use to mark their territory. Amazon is planning to "represent."

Why tag?

[polv0]

One of the major problems with Amazon is that there is little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback, unless I want to itch my altruistic 'benefit the shopping masses' bug, or i have some axe to grind. However, i use the Netflix rating system extensively, because they use my ratings to provide feedback on what new movies I might like, and the system actually works. How can Amazon incentivize people to tag??

Re:Why tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

crap tag!

Re:Why tag?

[grendel]

Amazon does use your ratings to improve the recommendations it makes to you.

Re:Why tag?

[DECS]

its like wikipedia - you ad what you know, and benefit from what other people have added.

explaining why feedback from others might be useful to you is difficult, because it should already be obvious.

Re:Why tag?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Amazon ... [has] little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback.... However, i use the Netflix rating system extensively, because they use my ratings to provide feedback on what new movies I might like, and the system actually works. How can Amazon incentivize people to tag??

By using your ratings to provide feedback on what new books you might like. And yes, the system actually works.

Re:Why tag?

[MaelstromX]

No, it's not like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a goal of creating a free extensive online encyclopedia, and in the interest of pursuing this goal I, the reader, am encouraged to do my part whenever possible to improve or add to it.

Amazon.com has a goal of turning a profit. This tag system is an effort to increase sales by pointing potential customers to items that they are more likely to purchase (note: purchase, not want or need). Seeing as though I am not an Amazon.com employee nor a stockholder, I don't feel any sort of burning desire to help them with this goal.

Re:Why tag?

[DECS]

Wikipedia and Amazon may have differing goals, but the incentive of contributors (the topic under discussion) is the same: people want to add their two cents, inform, enlighten, or just blab.

Nobody needs Amazon, and nobody needs Wikipedia. But both serve useful purposes when searching for information. I frequently use Amazon to shop or look up products that I intend to buy elsewhere.

I think if you peruse comments on Amazon, you'll realize the rest of the world isn't so demanding of a socialist-paradise return on their contributions to society. I doubt if many people have a burning desire to help anyone at all, but clearly Wikipedia and Amazon are benefiting from the minority of people who have time to spend adding their ideas, without regard to being paid back for pitching in, whether or not the entity they are contributing to is benefitting financially or not.

Re:Why tag?

[bcrowell]

As several other people have already noted, the main incentives to review on Amazon are egoboo plus a desire to be influential. There are people like the controversial Harriet Klausner who post several reviews a day, every day of the year, and many people are skeptical that these people can actually have read all the books they are reviewing. It's also common to hear stories about people gaming the system, e.g., professors getting their grad students to write glowing reviews of their books.

I run a site (see my sig) that does something similar for books that are free on the web, and it's quite common to see authors making transparently obvious attempts to post reviews of their own books.

Re:Why tag?

[akgw]

I think that is a fear the is inherrent in all feedback systems, but if you want to see one that 'just works', you have to look no further than eBay. It just seems to be the more you put into the system, the more you get out of it.

TAG TEAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Amazon has a official Tag Team now?

Or the ...

[temojen]

WTF are they talking about? posts. Like this one.

Re:Or the ...

[handslikesnakes]

Tagging is slang for writing graffiti.

Re:Or the ...

[DrSkwid]

wrong.

If you do a big mural you tag it with your name so people know who did it.

Then people got into skipping the part where they did the mural.

Getting your tag into the riskiest / most visible spot brings you kudos.

Re:Or the ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, er.. in what way does your use of the word "wrong" apply?

Re:Or the ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're pretty dumb.

Like the Reviews

[Shadow Wrought]

I wonder if they are worried about having to keep the tagging system in check (much like the Family Circus review from a few years back). For instance, what happens when a "Lemur" tag is placed on every Monty Python item?

Re:Like the Reviews

[miyako]

I was thinking much along the same lines. How long until people use tags so that searching for books about homosexuality or atheism returns a list of very conservative christian propaganda. What about tagging all the books about creationism with the "evolution" tag?.
What I really fear is that groups are going to use this system to censor information or entertainment they don't agree with by polluting the tag system so that every signle search returns 110 versions of the king james bible.

Patentability

[JemVai777]

Has Amazon patented this yet? If not, what prior art can act as an obstacle?

Re:Patentability

[jabbo]

http://del.icio.us/ being in production for well over a year ought to provide sufficient prior art...

Re:Patentability

[Anonymous Coward]

LiveJournal uses tags as well. -and it works great!

Re:Patentability

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

http://del.icio.us/ being in production for well over a year ought to provide sufficient prior art...

Nonsense! Here at the USPTO we grant patents irrespective of trivial details like prior art, gross obviousness and indeed patentability itself.

who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

move along people nothing to see here

Gmail?

[noz]

Is this akin to Gmail's labels?

Re:Gmail?

[DenmaFat]

Yes, because e-mails can have more than one label associated with them.

No, because you don't get the tag cloud that shows you that a lot of e-mails have a particular tag (sex, for example) by showing that tag in a larger typeface.

In future news...

[dada21]

News.com.com will report that Amazon has received a patent "for the ability of a web object to be identified by the site's users' input of short descriptions or keywords."

As an ex-record store owner, I stopped selling due to Amazon's competitive pricing and selection. I'm a fan of competition, yet the music scene I catered to is completely gone as stores like mine ran the street teams that grew the movements.

Now, Amazon finds a great way to cut salaries by skipping the need for hiring description editors. Still good for the consumer, and in the long run everyone will do better with the savings they reap, creating new and interesting markets.

I forsee this heavy competition leading to manufacturer direct sales, completed cutting Amazon out. They have to be very careful in offering not just cheap and fast, but great return policies and strong user customization of the sites.

Re:In future news...

[alakon]

Still good for the consumer, and in the long run everyone will do better with the savings they reap, creating new and interesting markets.

Technically...

According to economic theory, salaries of people like "description editors" are sunk costs- they are costs that do not increase or decrease in relation to the sales of the books they describe.

Since presumably Amazon is already pricing the product at the optimal point where they can charge the most and still keep a decent volume of sales (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium for more detail), economic theory says that a change in sunk costs ultimately won't make any difference for the consumer (unless the increase in costs is enough to make the company go bankrupt or exit the market - not relevant, however, in this case).

Now an investor, however, would be excited about reducing these costs. But my point is- the consumer isn't going to benefit.

Correct me if I'm wrong?

Re:In future news...

[dada21]

I'm on of the few who dispute the economic equilibrium theory. As an Austrian economist, I hold a stronger belief in Mises' evenly rotating economy (ERE). Reading any writings on time preference helps dispel the thought behind EE.

Since presumably Amazon is already pricing the product at the optimal point

This is a bad presumption. My record store sold everything at keystone (100% over cost). Most Amazon prices were 20%. Some small sites sold at 5%.

. But my point is- the consumer isn't going to benefit.
  Correct me if I'm wrong?

The selling price of a product wil always seek out its cost now that the Internet cuts of so many middle men. In some direct markets (writing, music recording, etc) I think the artist has to sell direct. Other items (hard goods) will definitely come down in price as profits get chased to near zero.

In both situations you have the consumer paying less, leaving them with more money to spend on other things. Yet if the retailers fail, the consumer's job might lose its customers. The new circle of economical life will be interesting!

Re:In future news...

[Anonymous Writer]

As an ex-record store owner, I stopped selling due to Amazon's competitive pricing and selection. I'm a fan of competition, yet the music scene I catered to is completely gone as stores like mine ran the street teams that grew the movements.

I had no idea Amazon messed up niche music scenes. Has online music from non-RIAA sources (such as the "A few alternatives" list" on this page) somewhat reversed that? I thought online music would somehow help new music movements gain more widespread popularity faster.

Guess what will be the next Amazon patent ...

[rawwa.venoise]

Just a guess, after the latest Amazon dumb patent ...

Only wait for the patent.

[nukeindia.com]

It may well prove to be the most visible example of a company incorporating tags as a way to bring order to information

It may well prove the end of any other company legally be able to incorporate tags as a way to bring order to information.

Never expect Amazon to show the community any innovative (or non-innovative) way to do anything. They are there only to block advancement by patenting anything they use and aggressively enforcing it.

Keywords with a new name

[autopr0n]

Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome.

Re:Keywords with a new name

[Sabaki]

Keytags! (Damn, should have patented that. But damn, the .com is taken.)

Re:Keywords with a new name

[dslauson]

"Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome."

OK, funny, but you, and a lot of other people seem to be missing the point. If a webmaster comes up with a few keywords for a page or item or whatever, that's the old-school way.

The cool thing about tagging is that it is allowing the unwashed masses to categorize stuff. It sort of casts aside the idea of a rigid heirarchy of categories, and uses a "free association" style of categorization.

I think it kind of remains to be seen how useful this will be in aiding people's shopping, especially if you're looking for something specific. Still, I think it's a great idea to harness free manpower from the populace to perform tasks that are difficult for a computer to do unaided.

Re:Keywords with a new name

[Kelson]

Consider the number of people who run like heck when they hear anything that sounds vaguely technical.

Now which sounds more technical: keywords or tags?

Sometimes the name is important.

"I think so, Brain, but if they called them 'Sad Meals,' kids wouldn't want them."

Re:Keywords with a new name

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

The cool thing about tagging is that it is allowing the unwashed masses to categorize stuff. It sort of casts aside the idea of a rigid heirarchy of categories, and uses a "free association" style of categorization.

Basically, keywords + wiki = tags?

Re:Keywords with a new name

[ergo98]

Basically, keywords + wiki = tags?

More like keywords + PageRank (e.g. votes for keywords) = tags. Actually contextual PageRank that Google uses (where they analyze the text around every link into a site) is akin the "tags".

Of course the folksonomy aspect of it isn't mandatory. Flickr is held up as one of the primary examples of tags, yet the vast majority of photo tags are added by the photo "owners" themselves, just like the days of old with webpages and meta keywords. So you end up with nonsense like this.

Re:Keywords with a new name

[marauder404]

Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome.

Surprisingly, yes! A keyword and a tag appear to be the same -- it's just a word and it becomes associated with whatever it's attached to. However, when you ask someone to tag an object, like a photo, book, or a person, they end up thinking about the problem differently. Instead of distilling it down to ways that people would find that particular product via a search, they think about categorization, and that makes all the difference. Keywords are likely to be about the product (stapler, swingline, red) but tags may associate it with something else (office space, milton). It's all about changing the person's mindset in a very subtle but powerful way.

I consider tagging to be similar to blogging. In the end, it's just a page with some content, much as people have done since the web got started. However, the rebranding and a couple of good tools really accelerated the way people use it and changed the way they think about the content they write. Gone are the "homepages" with links to some photos, a resume, and maybe a list of links. Blogs are the new homepage. 98% of blogs are junk, like 98% of homepages were, but the 2% are truly gems now.

Re:Keywords with a new name

[njyoder]

...so you just spewed out all of that bullshit to say "user defined keywords"? Seriously, I love how everyone tries to sugar coat what are really just user defined keywords.

Throwing out words like "free association" doesn't make your point more valid, it makes you look stupid. This isn't free association. Free association is when you say one thing, then someone says the next thing that comes to mind, then the next thing after that which comes to mind, etc... This is an example of free assocation: cat, kitty litter, trash, garbage man, truck, diesel, rockefeller.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the user defined keywords you describe. If people tagged by free association, then the system would be totally useless, because the tags would end up being essentially random (tagging something related to cats as "rockefeller").

Re:Keywords with a new name

[osi79]

"Free association" means here that there are no pre-defined categories or even hierarchies of terms, but that the user can assign every keyword. About the "innovation" in tagging: No, tagging is not rocket science. It's not the new, great, hyper-complex funky concept that solves all our problems. Fortunately not. It's simple, and that's why it's good. People get it, and people use it, and that's why its useful. The social aspect, letting the "masses" do the categorization is what makes it useful. It's like with most successes on the net: Is HTML rocket science which was never there before? No. There were far more complex hypertext systems which made some researchers rave, but which never took off.

Tags and "smart folders"

[rsborg]

The concept of "tagging" extends "smart folders" (smart folders being tags that a user puts on their own files) by allowing you to see other people's tag metadata. The problem with this, of course, is going to be when people start making activism based tags...

Interesting thing to see if they come up with some "moderation system"... perhaps a way for the users to validate and agree upon said tags? Or will they just say if enough people say the same/similar thing... it must be true?

Re:Tags and "smart folders"

[TCQuad]

This may be useful for outright abuse, but you will have moderation wars when someone labels Anne Coulter's new book as "right-wing propoganda" or Al Franken's as "liberal whining". There is no best case in this situation; if everyone cancels each other out, then the tag stands. If one ideology dominates, then bias will become quickly evident.

Tags useful, but for books?

[seathunter]

Tagging is really useful for collaborative categorizing of unstructured sets of items such as images (as shown on Flickr). However, in the case of books the system is already quite well-structured -- all books have unique identifiers (ISBNs) and each book belongs to one or more pre-defined (the Dewey classification system), so it will be really interesting to see if "anarchistic tagging" can bring some gains to an area previously dominated by "expert classification" (the Dewey system). Compare with the case of Wikipedia ("collaborative and anarchistic") v.s. Encyclopædia Britannica ("expert and controlled").

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[droptone]

"expert classification" (the Dewey system)

I could of sworn most larger libraries used the Library of Congress Classification system.

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[merreborn]

Not every book has a Dewey Decimal number, not every dewey decimal number is in amazon's database (they don't even have a full set of weight/dimension data), and dewey decimal doesn't even do everything tags do.

A tag could tell me if this book is part of the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, and searching by that tag could net me a list of all books in the series. Dewey Decimal can't do that.

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[Hast]

Listen to this speech
Ontology is Overrated by Clay Shirky (from ITConversations creat site!).

Then if you look at the 200 Religion category in the Dewey decimal system you will most likely see a tad bit of unbalancedness. Out of 100 classification slots there are more that are unused than that are allocated to non-Christian religions. A quick overview suggests that a majority of them actually has "Christianity" explicitely in the name or implicitely by being about eg Jesus. Now this may work well in the US, but it sure doesn't work very well in the rest of the world.

Furthermore what Shirky comments on in the speech above is that the entire idea of dividing something into smaller topics is really only needed when you have a physical limitation. (Ie you can't put a physical book in two different bookshelves.) But for all intents and purposes all ontology systems fail in more or less spectacular ways. Furthermore they are always made by someone with (typically) only a vague idea of the topics being ordered.

He also talks about how free form tagging systems like on Flickr and Delicious allow for a more true categorisation to form freely. Similarly to how comments can spread information just the study of how people group items together can give us a lot of knowledge about the items. (This could give the recommendations on Amazon a huge boost in relevance.)

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[Hast]

I didn't preview and then Slashcode seems to have swallowed my reply.

Anyways the link to the speech is http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.htm l.

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[ShadeEagle]

In the USA perhaps. Every library I've been to has used Dewey decimal system.

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[Omestes]

Sometimes when I go to the huge used bookstore by my house, I can't find what I'm looking for, just because I have no idea what genre some publisher monkey wanted to force that book to be in. Try House of Leaves, or such, what genre is it? Fiction? Sci-Fi? Horror? Or even authors who right across genres but are popular for one, hence all of Stephen King's Gunslinger books being thrown into horror, same with some of Koontz' fiction.

Then we have the older books just thown into literature. What the heck does that mean? Should Kerouac be thown in with Kafka and Tolstoy as general lit? In most bookstores Self Help and hard Psychology are thrown together. And Philosophy and New Age. Neither of these make sense.

But with Amazon, this makes less sense, being that they have a search feature. Do people really browse Amazon like they browse physical shops?

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Academic and National libraries generally use UDC - Universal Decimal Code.

How do I know? I was Assistant Librarian (second in line) in a academic library and worked at a company that produced software in use by national and academic libraries throughout the world.

Re:Tags useful, but for books?

[osi79]

> all books have unique identifiers (ISBNs) What is this exactly good for? an ISBN is an ID, and that only helps if I have that ID. I actually never have it when I search for a book. I know the author, or some part of the title etc. > "expert classification" (the Dewey system) So, from where should I know where Dewey's Classification puts the books in? Some expert may say "This book is about A", but I see other aspects B and C. No static, pre-defined classification scheme can catch all possible categorizations that make sense to users. Tagging could help here. Let's see if it is really useful at amazon.

Tags - old?

[Old Wolf]

I, for one, have been using tags in HTML for quite some time now. In fact, since the first HTML page I ever wrote, if memory serves me.

Amazon, listen up!

[dbc]

Amazon's handling of series is lamer than that. I recently bought later books in a series, and it recommened earlier books in the series. *Helloooooo* Amazon, I bought them from you, you dorks. In theory, you make recommendations to me based on past purchases, so you must *know* what I've already bought. How about filtering those *out* of recommendations? *duh*

What is a tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is a tag?

sip cap concord

[davekebab]

Amazon's (statistically improbable phrases) and CAPs (capitalized phrases) plus their concordance (alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book) are excellent web2.0 tidbits.

These semantic baubles should be dangled from blogs as much as tags should be glued into amazon records.

There's an example here (with the concordance and text stats linked half way down).

If only they were as good with their deliveries (after a three week wait in 2003 I gave up on them)

DK

Re:sip cap concord

[ScottyH]

What exactly about this is Web 2.0?

You, and your Web 2.0, are ridiculous.

Every Tom Swift, Moby Dick, and Harry Potter?

[magefile]

Or every Tom Clancy, Phillip K Dick and Harold Pinter?

Tagging and their new web mapping service?

[Lord Satri]

I wonder if they plan to integrate this tagging idea to their newly launched web mapping service.

(This hasn't been on /.'s mainpages, but Amazon added a map service earlier this month, you can read more about it.)

Tags and commerce.

[jbum]

Personally I welcome this, but with some trepidation. My coverpop system uses Amazon's web services
to build interactive mosaics.

Currently their search system tends to produce a lot of irrelevent results, because
vendors tag their own products, and unscrupulous vendors tend to assign misleading tags.
For example, when I tried to build a "harry potter" mosaic, I got a ton of search results
that had nothing to do with harry potter.

A collaborative tagging system has the potential to produce more accurate results, especially
if there is a system in place for users to collaboratively give weight to tags, similar to
Slashcode's moderation system. A free tagging system (like Flickr has) is likely to be problematic
on a system in which is commerce is involved, because there is a huge incentive to abuse it.

I originally noticed this on Friday

[hansbleep]

I posted a screenshot and a few comments to my weblog on this when I noticed it on some of my Amazon sessions last week... Link, if you want to see the screenshot

Check out Amazon's misdeeds and mischief

[Anonymous Coward]

http://malfeasance.50megs.com/

Unnecessary bandwagonmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Tagging spaces (also called 'folksonomies') are interesting for information retrieval where well understood taxonomies (category hierarchies) don't or can't exist.

Tags aren't applicable to Amazon's domain because everyone knows how to categorize consumer products. Everyone knows to walk to the Electronics section in Target to pick up the XBox360.

Nobody goes looking for their XBox 360 in the "blackthings" section or the "overhyped" tagsection.

Leave folksonomies to categorize the web like http://del.icio.us/ photos like http://flickr.com/ or art like http://cafepress.com/

Re:Unnecessary bandwagonmanship

[JPyun]

Well, for one its not a blackthing. If you don't even know what it looks like, I wonder how you've determined if its "overhyped."

Re:Unnecessary bandwagonmanship

[Hatta]

Am I the only person to ask "wtf is tagging?"? I gather we're not talking about id3 here.

Re:Unnecessary bandwagonmanship

[hobbit]

Clearly you have no idea how powerful folksonomies are. You will nonetheless be welcome in the 21st century if and when you decide to make the journey.

Yahoo's My Web

[ogiller]

I recently started using Yahoo's My Web 2.0. It makes use of Tags to categorize "Bookmarks".

I think Tags are a great technology to categorize things into multiple categories. This was previously difficult to do with folders, or priorities. By using tags you can assign both the subject of the item, the source of the item, and the author without having to create specific fields for each of these categories.

I have started to do this with Yahoo's My Web. If I find an interesting Slashdot article I will tag it with a category and add a tag for Slashdot. This was previously not possible with favorites. Using favorits I could only categorize items to a category (even when I used sub folders).

Some of you might say that Del.icio.us has been doing this for some time. Well I became aware of the technology through the powerful Yahoo toolbar.

Apparently they don't know.

[rotagivan]

I asked my uncle Tom, cousin Dick, and a guy that works at a convienence store named Harry about tags. None of them know what tags are or why their used. Maybe this will take longer to catch on than speculated.

In related news....

[leprkan]

In related news, Amazon started selling vibrators recently. and another

Re:In related news....

[Billosaur]

And in a strange juxtaposition, when you look at the vibrator pages, there's the prominently displayed "Add To Wedding Registry" button... just the kind of wedding present the newlyweds will really care about!

They're user-assigned CATEGORIES dfjkhgjklsfh

[solios]

Every time I hear "tagging" I think grafitti. The word has negative connotations in this context. :P

Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[drewness]

It's even worse with CD's. I'll buy a CD and then they'll recommend the Clean version and the Import version and the Special Edition version, ad nauseum. And I fear clicking "Not Interested", because I don't want them to think I don't like that band. "Not Interested" needs to have a thing where you can specify *why* you aren't interested, like "I own another version", "I have it in a box set already", as well as stuff like "I hate this band/author/whatever".

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[CrowScape]

Having experience with the "Not Interested" button, it is not factored into your preferences. I have to do this for books as well, as after buying the hardcover they like to recommend the paperback.

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[drewness]

Having experience with the "Not Interested" button, it is not factored into your preferences.
Well, that's a shame too. I'd really like to be able to specify "I really hate this band" sometimes. Some of their suggestions are just plain bad.

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[sobriquet.net]

Isn't that what the "I own it" checkbox is for?

While I admit it would be sensible for amazon to group various editions of a CD/book/whatever and NOT suggest them multiple times, selecting "I own it" should solve your problem.

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll buy a CD and then they'll recommend the Clean version and the Import version and the Special Edition version, ad nauseum.

What I really hate is once I recommended the wide screen edition of a movie I liked (I didn't pick the wide screen edition for any reason, it was the first on that appeared in a list). So suddenly I'm getting wide screen editions of any old movie out there.

And the movies had nothing to do with one another -- it was all based off of the "wide screen" selection. Pretty poor recommendation algorithm.

However their book recommendations are usually spot on and I frequently just look at that to see what I want to read next. Amazon's made hundreds, if not thousands of dollars off of me with just that service.

Now only if they could expand it to individual chapters they could improve the quality of books out there. Maybe I should patent that idea.

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[drewness]

Isn't that what the "I own it" checkbox is for?

I suppose. I don't own "it" though; just something very much like it. Plus, I then wonder if I'm going to have the opposite problem of what I feared about "Not Interested", i.e. they might overestimate my love for that particular band/author/whatever.

I think my overarching problem is overanalyzing how the system might work. If I turned my brain off to some degree I would stop coming up with scenarios like that. ;)

Re:Their whole recommendation system is screwy

[Loconut1389]

I put a childrens book in my cart for my son and it started recommending to me weight loss books for women. I'm a male. These are definately bad recommendations.

Why tag? - Why not?

[McFadden]

Sure, you could argue that people have little incentive to tag on Amazon, but then you could make the same argument for writing reviews, rating a product, or making recommendation lists - yet thousands of people do it every day. One of the great things about the 'net is that it is one of the few remaining places in life that you occasionally witness a little altruism.

Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wrong)

[Jucius Maximus]

Just another example of lame amazon profiling: I recently received this e-mail from amazon.com:

"Dear Amazon.com customer, Based on your previous apparel, jewelry, and kids' purchases, we thought you might like to know you can save 20% to 50% at the (retailer name removed) Half-Yearly Sale, going on now! Save on a great selection of apparel, shoes, and accessories for women and kids."

Of course there are holes in Amazon's logic:
1. I have never made any apparel, jewelry and kids' purchases at amazon.com
2. Amazon does not ship those things outside the US anyway and I'm in Canada so it's *impossible* for me to buy those things.
3. Even if I wanted to buy anything at this retailer's sale, they only ship apparel, shows and accessories within the US.
4. I am not a woman.

Great job, Amazon.com. Keep showing me, a heterosexual non-american male, all that gay-interest stuff in the gold box and I'm sure to bite sooner or later. Or maybe this is supposedly how homophobes think a person 'turns' gay.

hey! coverpop is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

this is off-topic, but let me just say: i love coverpop! and those other image-based visualizations you do are great, too! keep'em coming!

Re:hey! coverpop is awesome!

[jbum]

Hey Thanks :) Moderate parent up :) tee hee.

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[emurphy42]

Are you sure that e-mail was really from Amazon, and not a phishing attempt?

Try deleting cookies.

[sulli]

Perhaps they know you'll pay more because you signed up for Amazon Prime?

Re:Try deleting cookies.

[Monkelectric]

I'm thinking thats exactly whats going on. But I have no way to prove it.

Re:Try deleting cookies.

[Darius Jedburgh]

You can prove it just by deleting your cookies. I doubt they use any other way to identify you.

Re:Try deleting cookies.

[Monkelectric]

Amazon was caught doing differential pricing before ... You'd think they'd be more clever about it this time around.

Re:Try deleting cookies.

[Anonymous Writer]

You'd think they'd be more clever about it this time around.

If they thought of anything new, they would have patented it.

Pride.

[cribcage]

One of the major problems with Amazon is that there is little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback, unless I want to itch my altruistic 'benefit the shopping masses' bug...

It is partly altruism, but it's mostly pride. Amazon provides a voting system where customers can mark whether a specific review was helpful; and as a reviewer, you can watch your tally rise if people find your reviews useful. If you take it really seriously, you can make it into the Top 1,000 reviewers where you get a special "badge"; and in the Top 100, well, those folks are hardcore.

But to answer your (implicit) question: The incentive is pride. Good, old-fashioned, seven-sins pride.

Tagging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that similar to dogging?

XML?

[Blazeix]

This sounds very similar to XML. How is it different?

Porn?

[Grendel Drago]

Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn. Anyone? Damn it, when will I be able to satisfy my desire of finding tattooed girls with brightly-dyed hair wearing jog bras and boxers? It can't just be me, can it?

Re:Porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't just be me, can it?

Yes, it's just you!

Re:Porn?

[frankm_slashdot]

to hell with that a/c post below this.. im with you man. you know of any good sites that provide that kinda stuff besides suicidegirls? haha. bright redheads in boxers with tattos are HOTTTTTT. hahah.
late,
- frank

Re:Porn?

[Omestes]

NSFW, of course, Porn.a.licious, all you had to do is search /., it was the first thing in Google.

I think its even maintained by a fellow /, drone.

Re:Porn?

[Anonymous Writer]

Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn.

Your comment just reminded me to look up Cleveland Steamer after hearing it mentioned on Family Guy. That show is so friggin' demented.

Re:Porn?

[natural1]

http://suicidegirls.com/

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Jucius Maximus]

Actually I was referring to a bunch of books that they were showing me in the Gold Box that I only knew about due to recommendations from gay friends.

Tom's Harry Dick?

[Sr. Pato]

Sorry, too much penguin mints.

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Jucius Maximus]

"Are you sure that e-mail was really from Amazon, and not a phishing attempt?"

Yes, it was sent to a dedicated sneakemail address I use only for amazon.ca and amazon.com.

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Sorry :)

I suppose I shouldn't have snapped - I just read the bit about the jewellery etc. and the bit about the gay inclination and assumed...

A typical case of the internet/text messages leading to mistaken impressions!

Implementing tags on every site seems silly.

[handslikesnakes]

It seems to me that using del.icio.us and GreaseMonkey to tag a URL and then display those tags makes more sense than every site creating its own implementation.

A centralized tagging service (think hoodwink.d, if anyone knows what I'm talking about) means that it's easy to get connections between those tags (jump to Flickr straight from Amazon, for example). And of course, it doesn't need to be centralized; you could just as easy run your own tag server for private things, or subscribe to interest-specific tag servers.

Lots of flexibility on other sites too; on Slashdot, rather than marking someone "friend" or "foe" I could tag them "idiot" or "troll" or "guru".

Dear Amazon - Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

TO PATENT!!

you whores!

Boycott amazon

[reykjavik2005]

I have stopped using amazon ever since they openly admitted to changing prices based on what they thought your income was. So for instance, if you did searches for medical books or law books, they assumed you were a wealthy doctor or lawyer and thus every item you looked up after that had the price cranked up.

heres the proof:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/24/ramasastry.websi te.prices/

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Anonymous Coward]

" are you sure that they havent allready turned you gay? It might be more profitable to them if you were"

Holy shit, now that you mention ...

In other words, How to Get Cheap Amazon Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this a problem? Simply sign up with a new name, "Really Poor Guy", then search for books on making your dollar stretch to its limits, budgeting, and other such titles.

Then go buy the book you want. Fifty cents? Why yes, thank you.

technology???

[idlake]

You must be kidding calling "tagging" a "technology". Tagging is as ancient as the Chinese and Egyptians and has been used on computers as long as there have been computers.

The problem with tagging is that it's about as much fun as sorting a dropped deck of punchcards; people just don't do it unless they are getting paid for it or have absolutely no choice. For example, professional photographers tag because they lose lots of sales otherwise.

And before anyone files the obvious patent, automatic tagging has also been attempted; that is, tagging where the tags are generated by some automated procedure (rule-based, AI, machine learning, ...) that analyzes text, images, sound, and relationships among objects, determines appropriate tags, and assigns them. The problem with automatic tagging is that it doesn't work well yet.

Re:technology???

[ssanders82]

Anyone know whether these tags will be available from their API? I run GreedyMe.com, a wishlist site, and if someone enters an Amazon item then I pull info using the API. I've been thinking about implementing tags for items on my site, but pulling them directly from Amazon would be much easier. Then I could make suggestions and recommendations based on those tags. And take over the world.

Wrong taggging

[The_reformant]

I thought great idea for a second when I thought they were going to POS tag books (seens how theyre scanning them anyway) but then i read the article and realised that its basically rubbish.

Are they going to patent tagging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they going to patent tagging like one-click shopping?

They will patent it

[jeremy.quinn]

I can just see what comes next ....... Amazon's use of tags becomes successful, they apply for and are awarded a patent on the 'technology', the USPO being stupid enough to grant it (we have the history to prove it, no?)

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Soybean47]

My favorite email from Amazon started with the line, "We've noticed that customers who have purchased Crusade: The Complete Series have also ordered The Flintstones: The Complete Fourth Season."

Now, I'm sure the sample "people who bought Crusade" was pretty small, so perhaps their software got confused. It just seemed pretty funny that there is apparently some sort of tie-in between liking Crusade (a failed Babylon 5 spin-off, for those Slashdotters who may not be that particular sort of geek) and liking The Flintstones. And not just Flintstones in general... season 4 of the Flintstones, specifically.

I'm sure there's a psychology paper in there somewhere.

pages or products?

[osssmkatz]

I can't find my way around Amazon.com. How do you create one of those Listmania things again? (any help would honestly appreciated.) Should one really have to purchase Amazon.com for dummies in order to find there way around? Why don't they allow people to tag every page? --Sam

Tag Team?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoomp There It Is!!!

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[corvenus]

I had the same exact email just a few days ago and had the same reaction. Great marketing job indeed, Amazon...

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[laffer1]

Irony is that the parent posted as anonymous coward aka in the closet.

Re:Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wron

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite email from Amazon started with the line, "We've noticed that customers who have purchased Crusade: The Complete Series have also ordered The Flintstones: The Complete Fourth Season."


LOL! My favorite is the "people that also bought X also bought clean underwear" Well at least I'm in good company.

But whose fault is it really?

[hao2lian]

Well, really, it's your company's fault for naming itself Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Incorporated.