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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

[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.

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.

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").

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.