Amazon Starts Offering Tags to Some

I was annoyed when I read the article at Kokogiak about Amazon's tagging experiments. Apparently not everyone could see the tags. And sure enough, I couldn't. But when I went to work and I was doing some Amazon things -- yes, I do occasionally use Amazon in the course of my work -- surprise! I found tags! And in case you're one of the unlucky 50% I took some screenshots for you.

You will have to have an Amazon account to use the tags, and if you haven't set up your "Real Name" or "Pen Name" you'll have to do that too.

Here's how it works. Toward the bottom of each initial page of listings you'll see a little form that says "My Tags". Here you can add tags for a book.

Don't try to add a bunch of tags at a time -- they'll show up as one long tag, even if you separate words by a space or a comma. Instead you'll need to Add a tag, hit enter, add a tag, hit enter.

There doesn't appear to be a limit to how many tags you can add for a book/item, nor does there seem to be any limit to how many items you can tag. Though I can imagine if you added more than a moderate number the "Manage Tags" page would get very unwieldy (more about that in a minute.)

If you type your tags in slowly you'll see that Amazon recommends tags that other people have typed in before you. Some of these are kinda weird, and they don't appear to have any bearing on the item you're currently looking at.

If you decide to edit a tag you can go to Edit and get a list of tags for a particular book. Note you have to click on the X next to the tag AND THEN click Save Changes. Otherwise your tags won't vanish and you'll end up trying three times to get rid of the same tag.

By default the tags you add are public. But if you click on Your Tags you can get a new page list of your tags. Each tag has a pull-down menu that you can use to mark your tag as public or private. Since each tag has an image of the book/item it's tagging, I can imagine this rapidly turning into a slow-loading, overbulky page.

Want to see a book that's already been tagged a lot? Try one of the Harry Potter books. Scroll down and look for a heading called "Customers Tagged This Item With". That'll lead you to a page that'll allow you to view all the tags for the particular item. Clicking on a tag itself will take you to an entire page-o-tags, related tags, Amazon users who used that tag, etc etc etc.

A clean URL to get to the tag page for any Amazon book (and possibly any Amazon item?) is http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/tags-on-product/xyxyxyxyxy/ . Replace xyxyxyxyxy with the ASIN or ISBN of your choice. If an item has no tags you'll get a summary page for the item and no additional information.

More fun URL structures. The clean URL to get the page for any given tag is http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/glance/xyxyxyx/ , replacing xyxyxyx with the word of your choice. Words which have no tags will give you a 404 error. Perhaps you want to see what other tags were used by customers who used a particular tag. Use http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/sims/xyxyxy, with xyxyxy replaced by the tag that you want to use as the base for seeing tags used by other customers.

I don't think this has been available very long; there are far fewer tags than I would expected and many items have no tags at all. But I would love to see this expand, especially if developers could get hold of the tags. What tags would start showing up? How would people tag consumables differently? What kind of clouds would appear?

Posted to Internet-Technology-Tagging | TrackBack