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

Keywords with a new name

[autopr0n]

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

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?

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.

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".