cruel to be kind

Via Anil Dash: Amazon to introduce tags on product pages

Hm. My initial thought was “Oh great. Now we have to separate tagland into sellers and ‘normal’ taggers”. At least if they ping that out to the tag services out there.

Second, if they would do, I would expect that we need a modell very quick of self control (like monitoring themselves what a company like Amazon has as an output) as well as a paying model. Because when those servers get pinged every time a new tag is added to the list. That could be a lot of pings to chew on.

On the other side, I can very well see a working model of “Books with this tag” and to bring that even further, think about it: Customers who bought this book also liked books on this tag.

Not ‘bought the same book’ but tagged them. Every Amazon addict has a wish list which he counts in pages not items (did I mention that I want my freaking all in one page back?!) and knows that the “we only keep your shopping list for 90 days” is a lie. I would have to go in there, but I am guessing this list stays for several years. It does at least in my case.

But back to tagging. We don’t buy all the books we want to have, due to logistical problems as well as financial. But we know they are good and we would like to have them. Amazon customers already today make their own lists, write reviews – it is only natural for them to expand this to tags. And I am *really* interested to see the RSS feeds from those tags.

Because even if I do not buy them, I might be interested in reading the reviews. We will get review feeds also, right? And trailer feeds for new released DVDs? MP3 snippets for newly released music Cd’s?

Tags (and their feeds) will also be cool for doing Amazon Associates; but even more the model of ‘I trust this reviewer. I want to see his tags or all the tags of my contacts.”

And yes. Of course this is mass data mining – which we have to deal with in another way, but we need to start with the opportunities.

Btw, I don’t agree with Anil that everything should have tags. But I do agree that everything should have a feed! :)

Tag(s): amazon tags, tags, wish list, feeds

Tags: tools