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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."
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?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
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/
Every time I hear "tagging" I think grafitti. The word has negative connotations in this context. :P
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".
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.
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.