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.

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?

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.