July 21st, 2006
Tagging Talk
by Joshua Porter | 
7 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/437
For those interested in tagging, I’m giving a live virtual seminar (webcast) next Thursday (July 27): Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for your Site? This is the second seminar we’ve given at UIE, and we’re really excited by the response and feedback generated by the first.
I’m focusing this talk on the idea that tagging might help designers organize huge amounts of information by letting their users do it for them. Heresy! You say. Well, in some places it might turn out that tagging beats IA hands down. In others, a traditional IA still works best.
However, if you’ve read The Del.icio.us Lesson, you know that it isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance. So I’ll be talking about the ins and outs of tagging, where it seems to work well, and where it doesn’t work.
Interestingly, both Amazon and Google seem to have tagging wrong…
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1. siftee 8:58am, Fri 21st, 2006
dude… you’re link should be to http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/
2. Josh 10:02am, Fri 21st, 2006
Haha, that’s embarrassing. I guess I wrote it a little too early in the morning…
3. vanderwal 10:35am, Sun 23rd, 2006
Hmm, I am interested in why you believe Amazon has tagging wrong as I really think they have tagging right. Amazon has the ability to add a few new tools and ways to let people self aggregate the their products. Amazon’s integration of tagging has not iterated as quickly as other things they have done and some of the interaction needs improvement.
There are many reasons why people would want to tag and there are a about five to seven reasons why a business would want to put tagging on their site, or integrate the means to easily tag in their information on an external tagging service.
4. Josh 3:18pm, Thu 27th, 2006
Thomas, as of right now, I wonder about Amazon because nobody seems to be using tags.
For example, look at the book The Long Tail, by Christopher Anderson.
It’s #16 on the bestseller list, and has been on Amazon since May. Hundreds of thousands of people have looked at this page…and there are 12 total tags.
The #1 book, Fiasco, has 2.
That says something important. Either people aren’t finding Amazon’s tagging useful (yet), or 12 tags is enough. Given the way that Amazon is using tags…they’re expecting lots of them…and 12 at this point would seem to be a failure.
I think the problem is that Amazon has not made the incentive to tag clear. Why would I add a tag? What’s in it for me? Del.icio.us Lesson, etc…
That’s my take right now. It’s not that they can’t be successful in the future, but they aren’t right now. Probably a little tweaking here and there and people will start to use them. Also, a small % on Amazon is different than a small % at almost everyplace else.
What’s your take?
5. vanderwal 6:22pm, Mon 14th, 2006
Josh, I will respond shortly as I just got back to the land of real connectivity.
One important things to keep in mind is there are only .5% of the people on the web tagging. This is quite small, but Amazon plays in the edges quite well, with a relatively low percentage of people building listmania list, but Amazon gets high sales conversion rates from the lists.
I have about 10 to 15 minutes focussing on what Amazon is actually doing well of a 50 minute presentation on the current state of tagging on the web. Amazon is doing many things better than anybody else on the web in the tagging area, they have not integrated it as well as it could be. The bits they are doing really well could be a huge hit if they focus on it.
6. John 8:09pm, Tue 2nd, 2007
That can be successful in the future.