Tagging had gotten everywhere. It’s the latest “gotta have” for your website. Gotta have tagging and one of those cool cloud things in the right hand column. But tag clouds are often just so much noise. Can’t tagging be put to better use?Did you know that there is tagging in Amazon? Six months ago it didn’t seem to be used much. Now it seems to be gaining enough mass to be useful.
A couple of examples.
The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way (a business/negotiation book).
It ranks #366 on Amazon’s sales list and has 47 reviews. It has twenty tags. The top tag is persuasion.
Clicking through on persuasion gets you a pretty useful listing of books.
Eight of the first ten books tagged persuasion are business titles. Most likely what you’d be looking for if you started with the Little Green Book. (The top book is of course some guy targeted dating book and there’s the oddity in place ninth place: “None but You” based on Jane Austen’s Persuasion.)
Now let’s try something a little less common.
Setting UP LAMP (just because it’s on my desk at the moment)
Ranks #67,422 and has 19 reviews. There are 9 tags, three people tagged it lamp and there are 8 other singleton tags. All the tags make sense.
Clicking on the lamp tag gets you… well books on LAMP yes but also a lot of lighting fixtures. Two lighting fixtures in the top ten and then it lights all the way down to the 27th item. The lists and guides aren’t useful. (You can get some help from the tag cloud at the bottom of the page though.) The second tag on the product page. books-computer-tools leads to a useful, though obviously privately meaningful, listing of books that you might want on your desk if you were working with LAMP.
Note that the tag pages have a link to the lists (ListMania and So You’d Like To…) that have been tagged with your chosen term. Though in the first example (persuasion) four of the five are bluntly aimed at becoming a better pick up artist. The two for lamp are a collection of Smooth Jazz music and a list of home decor books. Not ready for prime time? Or maybe just bad example choices on my part.
As an aside, I like the new rollovers for the product pictures
When you’re looking at a product picture on one of the lists — like the tagged items list — you roll over the picture and get a brief description of the item including price and rating.
