About Time! According to CNet, Amazon is heading down the road of tagging. This is great news in my book. I’m a follower of the Web 2.0 movement and have really been turned onto the idea of folksonomy (tagging) by products like Flickr and thus have recently brought MasterWish on board with tagging.
While many people out there have used tagging in Flickr, Gmail, MasterWish and various other web 2.0 apps…there are still many out there that express their opinions on tagging as “Tagging…WTF is that?!”. Having a large web company such as Amazon with its HUGE following jump on the band wagon with tagging will help bring folksonomy to the masses.
While exciting that this is happening, Amazon is slowly rolling tags out to their users as evidenced in this excerpt of the CNet article:
The idea, apparently, is to slowly experiment with tags and to give users some power over how certain Amazon products–books, for example–are categorized.
For now [...] only about half of Amazon’s users can even see tags on the site.
Its only a matter of time before folksonomy will cease to be a buzz word and start appearing in the english dictionary. Everybody and their brother will know of tagging and the world will be a happier, easier to search place. I can only hope
This is a great move by Amazon, and I like that they’re starting out somewhat experimentally to see how people use it, and then to build it out (or is that further in?) from there. It sounds like they’ve not only noticed an interesting trend in categorization, but have captured some of its spirit as well.
thx
aaa