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.

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).

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.

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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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?

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...

[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!

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

[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.

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 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").

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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."