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

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: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: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: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.