Amazon starts tagging
November 14th, 2005 | Written by jfolkmann | Topic: interwebLooks like the ecom giant has finally started letting people tag the products in their catalogue. At the moment it’s only available to 50% of the Amazon.com audience and isn’t available to other countries yet. Kokogiak has a good write up and links to Flickr photos for those that can’t see it.
I would imagine that the tags will prove to be an interesting way to find other books, improve Amazon’s search and eventually replace any hierarchy in their navigation. However, I can see spammers having a good time with this, Amazon will have to create some tools to deal with this…that or the community will have to self police a la wikipedia.
It also lends itself to serving some dodgy results. For example, I tagged Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell with “fantasy”, other items tagged with fantasy included the latest Britney Spears album.
It will be interesting to see how the experiment turns out.
