Tag, you're it

Earlier I wrote about the wisdom of crowds  a blog about StoryCode I never really developed the theme to cover Folksonomy. I may talk more about folksonomy later, but for now the take away is this; one of the key features of web 2.0 offerings is the use of a collective intelligence, think of this as audience participation if you like. Web 2.0 services really try to involve its users in the development of the service, and in many cases cannot exist without user participation. Tagging is one of the leading methods for doing this. So it was with enormous delight that I noticed Amazon are now trialing Tags.

Here’s the announcement

“Dear Amazon Community,

I’m posting this note on behalf of the Amazon Tags team.

We have another new feature for you today: tags. By the end of the day today, about 50% of you will see tags.
Tags provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. At any time, you can review the items you've tagged and make final gift decisions. You can add tags from the detail page for any product, and the items you’ve tagged and tags you’ve used are displayed on Your Profile.

You might want to tag items you've purchased in the past. This allows you to organize your collection in any way you wish. You can also use tags to help you remember items you're considering for purchase, e.g. if you are planning to buy a digital camera, you might tag several makes and models so that you can look at them side by side, organized the way you wish. Don't like the way Amazon has organized its science fiction or cookbooks? Tag the items you care about with the categories that matter to you. Because people's tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people's tags. What items have people tagged "gift" or "

Tuscany

" or "robot?"

Feel free to give tagging a try post your questions / comments here. The Amazon Tags team is reading this discussion board and is very interested in your feedback. “

Obviously the feedback will be via the forums, signup to participate:

Click the link for an Amazon Web Services developer token.

You should also apply for an Associates account. (so you can make money on your service)

I’m excited by this and I wonder how the tags will develop, will they help people create new trends in best sellers or will they be like listmania or the wishlist and help people find new articles on Amazon? 

Stay tuned there are exciting times ahead

Don