Amazon adds tagging—LibraryThing says hello!
Various places (Slashdot, Techcrunch, News.com) have reported that Amazon is now experimenting with tagging. Only some customers see the option, and I'm not among the chosen ones. I'm dying to know how Amazon tags are comparing against LibraryThing ones!
I'm not worring too much about this. I don't think people choose to use LibraryThing just to tag books. To the extent that tagging is the attraction, it's about tagging your own books. In less than three months LibraryThing users have applied more than 1,150,000 tags to their books. People will do amazing things with their own collection.
Will Amazon get the same kind of buy in? I'm a big-time Amazon customer, but tagging books on Amazon seems to me like volunteering to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton. I suppose if someone has an enormous number of items on their wishlist they will want some memory aid—the most important thing about tags. Absent that, I just don't see what Amazon customers will get out of it. On the other hand, Amazon has so much traffic that maybe the altruistic, leisured 1% will quickly fill Amazon up with tags.
Another worry. Until now, tags have not had much commercial value. I doubt that the Paris Tourism Board is spamming 43Places. But Amazon has seen review abuse before—not a few authors are livid at the practice. Will Amazon tagging lead to the introduction of the spag (spam tag*)?
Of course, at LibraryThing, despite enormous financial incentive to promote my wife's novels, I have yet to engage in any unfair tagging of her absolutely terrific works, The Mermaids Singing, In the Country of the Young (described by the New York Times as "exquisitely doomy") or the recently-released Love in the Asylum, for which I designed the hardback cover. No, we will never do that here.
*Go, my pretty new word. Go go! Settle the world with your beauty.
I'm not worring too much about this. I don't think people choose to use LibraryThing just to tag books. To the extent that tagging is the attraction, it's about tagging your own books. In less than three months LibraryThing users have applied more than 1,150,000 tags to their books. People will do amazing things with their own collection.
Will Amazon get the same kind of buy in? I'm a big-time Amazon customer, but tagging books on Amazon seems to me like volunteering to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton. I suppose if someone has an enormous number of items on their wishlist they will want some memory aid—the most important thing about tags. Absent that, I just don't see what Amazon customers will get out of it. On the other hand, Amazon has so much traffic that maybe the altruistic, leisured 1% will quickly fill Amazon up with tags.
Another worry. Until now, tags have not had much commercial value. I doubt that the Paris Tourism Board is spamming 43Places. But Amazon has seen review abuse before—not a few authors are livid at the practice. Will Amazon tagging lead to the introduction of the spag (spam tag*)?
Of course, at LibraryThing, despite enormous financial incentive to promote my wife's novels, I have yet to engage in any unfair tagging of her absolutely terrific works, The Mermaids Singing, In the Country of the Young (described by the New York Times as "exquisitely doomy") or the recently-released Love in the Asylum, for which I designed the hardback cover. No, we will never do that here.
*Go, my pretty new word. Go go! Settle the world with your beauty.
posted by Tim at 9:45 AM
20 Comments:
Unfortunately for your new word, it reminds me of Jim Spagg, notorious, late, asshole and public television pornographer here in Portland, Oregon. Of course, I suppose the comparison is apt.
If wishlists can be sorted by tags, that would be helpful, as I often use my wishlist as a shopping list. But heck, you can't even see authors on the front of the list at this time, so I don't have high hopes.
Wish I could see 'em, too.
I didn't realize that not everyone can see them. They just showed up the other day after I rated a lot of music. Could there be a correlation? I agree, they're superfluous.
I've been getting the tag feature at Amazon for a few days, that I've noticed, and I've tagged a few as I've added them to my wishlist. But I'm not about to go around tagging everything I own on a service where I can export my data and take it with me, though. So.. *yawn*
Whoops.
s/can/can't/
I think there could be some value in tags on Amazon for improving suggestions. People will probably play with it because it's a new toy anyway.
OK, I just went through my Amazon recommended list, did a few ratings and added a few to my wanted list. Then I noticed a "your tags" section just below the "Other editions" section.
When I tried to use it, I was taken to the form to apply for a Real Name (tm) which I don't want because it requires credit card details. I took instead the Pen Name option which didn't require credit card details, and now tags are working for me. So far I see they have autocomplete.
I could describe it as I play with it but I bet if you do a few ratings and such you'll also get the tags feature and can try it for yourself.
Good luck!
'volunteering to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton' . . . Ha ha ha!
I like the comparison to fluffing pillows at the Sheraton, but Amazon is just filled with customer book reviews, isn't it? Perhaps the willingness that people have to write free reviews gives Amazon confidence that they'll also bother to tag?
Hi! As this is the first time I've commented, I'd like to first thank you for making such a marvellous service available. I've found it truly addictive. One possible glitch I've found, however, lies in the new author pages: going through and combining (or not, as the case called for it) with glee, I found that amazon.fr had substituted the name of the editor for the name of the author of my copy of the Princesse de Clèves. I manually fixed the entry to read Madame de Lafayette, but, when clicking on her name, I am now directed to "author" instead of any variation on her name. I'm not certain how the system works, but would it be possible to have it integrate such manual fixes into the system? Thanks!
I've run into the same bug that Christophilus has.
The bug mentioned by christophilus seems to affect all titles for which any manual changes have been made after the book was first entered.
Spag and Spam both have food connections, so the terminology just might take off ...
Tags in Amazon.com perform a completely different function: they're notations to the world about your feelings about books that you may or may not own or ever have read. I can't think why anyone would bother doing this; if people want to amuse themselves that way, of course they're welcome to.
I use my tags though to remind myself of which books I own have something to do with which other books that are probably shelved somewhere else. It's been fascinating to discover what I have a lot of that I wouldn't have guessed, because I collected them over a few years and never really put them all in the same place. And to see trends and threads emerge is interesting too.
So I guess I see tags in Librarything as a form of ego-projection (it's all about me! me! really!) - and I can't see Amazon tags as performing the same function, at all.
I know I'm not being a team player here (sorry!), but... I think Amazon tags are handy for marking books that I'm not sure about. I find Amazon wishlists a little clunky.
note to maryb - of course the Amazon tags are handy, but they're serving a different function than the librarything tags. perhaps I'm not grasping the social function of tagging though, since I've never looked at anyone's tags but my own.
Tagism is here to stay. Just like googling. No one has a patent on tags right now. But, don't hold your breath, corporations like Amazon have offices filled with legal experts including patents attorneys.
I know that when you enter multiple tags they are seperated by a ,
So: flava,of,the,day
It seems that just because you get the tags one time on Amazon doesn't mean you get from then on. I haven't seem them again since my first time.
Maybe you used them wrong! :)
Speaking of tags, though, LT's tags would be much more useful to me if I could view intersections a la de.lic.io.us. (Or, for that matter, other kinds of combinations, but "AND" is much more important to me than "NOT" and "OR".) I tend to use the intersection of multiple tags to define a specific topic, e.g. "economics, statistics" rather than "econometrics".
..and now Amazon has added a "product wiki" as well.
/me rolls eyes
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