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Amazon Tries Its Hand at Tagging 145

Posted by Zonk from the not-with-spraypaint dept.
Kailash Nadh writes "Amazon has formed a 'tags team' and has begun using tags on some pages. 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." From the article: "Ultimately, this is interesting because it may well prove to be the most visible example of a company incorporating tags as a way to bring order to information. Outfits like Flickr are big and have tremendous followings, but nothing compared to Amazon's. And if Amazon can make a go of tagging, that may finally be the tipping point that makes the technology something every Tom, Dick and Harry knows about."
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Amazon Tries Its Hand at Tagging More

Amazon Tries Its Hand at Tagging

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  • Cue the bad jokes about tagging (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @06:57PM (#14039655) Homepage Journal
    Q: How can you tell a blonde has been shopping on Amazon using your computer?
    A: There's spray paint on the screen.

  • Series? (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @06:57PM (#14039659) Journal
    One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series. If you've read book one, and want to buy books two and three, you generally have to look up the order elsewhere first. Hopefully people will start adding this information.

    • Re:Series? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:03PM (#14039700) Homepage Journal
      Sometimes it does. Or, more precisely, it'll say something like "This is the 2nd item in the XYZ series" under Product Details, and link to a series page. It's not quite a direct link to what's next, but it does tell you where it is in the sequence and direct you to a hub.
    • Amazon's handling of series is lamer than that. I recently bought later books in a series, and it recommened earlier books in the series. *Helloooooo* Amazon, I bought them from you, you dorks. In theory, you make recommendations to me based on past purchases, so you must *know* what I've already bought. How about filtering those *out* of recommendations? *duh*

      • Their whole recommendation system is screwy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by drewness ( 85694 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @08:02PM (#14040087) Homepage
        It's even worse with CD's. I'll buy a CD and then they'll recommend the Clean version and the Import version and the Special Edition version, ad nauseum. And I fear clicking "Not Interested", because I don't want them to think I don't like that band. "Not Interested" needs to have a thing where you can specify *why* you aren't interested, like "I own another version", "I have it in a box set already", as well as stuff like "I hate this band/author/whatever".
        • Having experience with the "Not Interested" button, it is not factored into your preferences. I have to do this for books as well, as after buying the hardcover they like to recommend the paperback.
        • Isn't that what the "I own it" checkbox is for?

          While I admit it would be sensible for amazon to group various editions of a CD/book/whatever and NOT suggest them multiple times, selecting "I own it" should solve your problem.
          • Isn't that what the "I own it" checkbox is for?

            I suppose. I don't own "it" though; just something very much like it. Plus, I then wonder if I'm going to have the opposite problem of what I feared about "Not Interested", i.e. they might overestimate my love for that particular band/author/whatever.

            I think my overarching problem is overanalyzing how the system might work. If I turned my brain off to some degree I would stop coming up with scenarios like that. ;)

      • Amazon.com thinks I'm a woman (and they're wrong) (Score:5, Funny)

        by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @08:07PM (#14040112) Journal
        Just another example of lame amazon profiling: I recently received this e-mail from amazon.com:

        "Dear Amazon.com customer, Based on your previous apparel, jewelry, and kids' purchases, we thought you might like to know you can save 20% to 50% at the (retailer name removed) Half-Yearly Sale, going on now! Save on a great selection of apparel, shoes, and accessories for women and kids."

        Of course there are holes in Amazon's logic:
        1. I have never made any apparel, jewelry and kids' purchases at amazon.com
        2. Amazon does not ship those things outside the US anyway and I'm in Canada so it's *impossible* for me to buy those things.
        3. Even if I wanted to buy anything at this retailer's sale, they only ship apparel, shows and accessories within the US.
        4. I am not a woman.

        Great job, Amazon.com. Keep showing me, a heterosexual non-american male, all that gay-interest stuff in the gold box and I'm sure to bite sooner or later. Or maybe this is supposedly how homophobes think a person 'turns' gay.

    • Re:Series? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 )
      One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series.

      The thing that irritates me about amazon are the constant price increases. I signed up for amazon prime and their f***ing prices keep going up. Its now actually cheaper for me to order music on bn.com and pay tax AND shipping than to order on amazon with my "free" amazon prime shippnig. *very pissed customer*

    • Re:Series? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 )
      One thing that irritates me about Amazon is that it will not tell you which book comes next in a series.

      Actually, they do for most series. When you click on A Crown of Swords [amazon.com], for example, the book title says "(The Wheel of Time, Book 7)", and there's a link below saying "This is the 7th item in The Wheel of Time Series [amazon.com] ".

      By the way, it's interesting to see the first few series Amazon has (by changing the /2/ in the URL). One through four are fantasy; 5 and 6 are movie trilogies, #7 is the soundtracks fr

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @06:58PM (#14039666)
    And if Amazon can make a go of tagging, that may finally be the tipping point that makes the technology something every Tom, Dick and Harry knows about.

    And just wait until Dick looks up all the stuff people have tagged with his name.

  • Maybe Amazon and Del.icio.us can get together and agree on a REST API [del.icio.us] for tags.

  • Appeal to a bigger audience (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drakethegreat ( 832715 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:04PM (#14039708) Homepage
    Its nice that the author assumes we know what tags are. It creates an article that only people who know whats going on already understand. Otherwise you go tag? What kind of tag?

    • Re:Appeal to a bigger audience (Score:5, Informative)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:17PM (#14039793) Homepage Journal
      Its nice that the author assumes we know what tags are. It creates an article that only people who know whats going on already understand. Otherwise you go tag? What kind of tag?

      Parent Post Tags: clueless "karma whore" "obvious question" :-)

      Seriously though, tags are user-provided categorization (including multiple "categorizations" given that you can apply multiple tags) of content. e.g. Search on Flickr [flickr.com] for all photos that are in the union of the tags Toronto and Girl and you'll get photos that have those two tags. The same concept applies to delicious. This is the so-called folksonomy in action, where us lowly serfs categorization content, rather than "the man" in a taxonomy like Yahoo.

      However the tag thing is going way too far (as are most "Web 2.0" things) - tags are useful in the absence of a superior classification system. For instance we tag photos in Flickr only because the system can't, thus far, determine what the photo is about mechanically. If it could automatically classify photos [yafla.com], then this folksonomy would prove terribly dated, unreliable, and inaccurate. Look at Google - what is better: The META keywords technique of before, or actually contextually placing each page based upon its actual content?

      • Re:Appeal to a bigger audience (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        In other words... keywords. Good to know of all this remarkable innovation that is taking place on the internet.

    • Re:Appeal to a bigger audience (Score:4, Informative)

      by seathunter ( 931361 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:25PM (#14039850) Homepage
      From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags [wikipedia.org]): "Tags are pieces of information separate from, but related to, an object. In the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords, tags are descriptors that individuals assign to objects."
      • Speaking of Wiki's, how come no one has come with a Wikipedia equivalent of a website like Amazon.com? What if every product page was a wiki where customers could customize it for other customers? I think Amazon is missing out.
        • What if every product page was a wiki where customers could customize it for other customers? I think Amazon is missing out.

          I heard a rumour that Amazon allegedly removes some negative comments about products in order to keep the inventory flowing. A wiki would probably make it harder for that kind of thing.

    • I think Outlook2003 does some kind of tagging. It likes to underline words that it thinks are related to something else, providing a link to that something else. It's fucking irritating. I don't want formatting or links in my e-mails that I, or someone didn't intend to be there.

      Even worse, I work in a division of a company that has the same name as a country. Every time our division name shows up, Outlook wants to send me off to links about the country - we don't even make our shit in that country.

      I can
    • You know.. tags. Those mostly unreadable spraypainted words that gangs use to mark their territory. Amazon is planning to "represent."

  • Why tag? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by polv0 ( 596583 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:07PM (#14039730)
    One of the major problems with Amazon is that there is little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback, unless I want to itch my altruistic 'benefit the shopping masses' bug, or i have some axe to grind. However, i use the Netflix rating system extensively, because they use my ratings to provide feedback on what new movies I might like, and the system actually works. How can Amazon incentivize people to tag??

    • Re:Why tag? (Score:2, Informative)

      by grendel ( 232 )
      Amazon does use your ratings to improve the recommendations it makes to you.

    • Re:Why tag? (Score:3, Informative)

      by DECS ( 891519 )
      its like wikipedia - you ad what you know, and benefit from what other people have added.

      explaining why feedback from others might be useful to you is difficult, because it should already be obvious.
      • No, it's not like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a goal of creating a free extensive online encyclopedia, and in the interest of pursuing this goal I, the reader, am encouraged to do my part whenever possible to improve or add to it.

        Amazon.com has a goal of turning a profit. This tag system is an effort to increase sales by pointing potential customers to items that they are more likely to purchase (note: purchase, not want or need). Seeing as though I am not an Amazon.com employee nor a stockholder, I don't feel
        • Wikipedia and Amazon may have differing goals, but the incentive of contributors (the topic under discussion) is the same: people want to add their two cents, inform, enlighten, or just blab.

          Nobody needs Amazon, and nobody needs Wikipedia. But both serve useful purposes when searching for information. I frequently use Amazon to shop or look up products that I intend to buy elsewhere.

          I think if you peruse comments on Amazon, you'll realize the rest of the world isn't so demanding of a socialist-paradise retu

    • Why tag? - Why not? (Score:2, Informative)

      by McFadden ( 809368 )
      Sure, you could argue that people have little incentive to tag on Amazon, but then you could make the same argument for writing reviews, rating a product, or making recommendation lists - yet thousands of people do it every day. One of the great things about the 'net is that it is one of the few remaining places in life that you occasionally witness a little altruism.

    • Re:Why tag? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @08:14PM (#14040155)
      Amazon ... [has] little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback.... However, i use the Netflix rating system extensively, because they use my ratings to provide feedback on what new movies I might like, and the system actually works. How can Amazon incentivize people to tag??

      By using your ratings to provide feedback on what new books you might like. And yes, the system actually works. [amazon.com]

    • Pride. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cribcage ( 205308 )

      One of the major problems with Amazon is that there is little to no incentive for me to rate a product or provide any feedback, unless I want to itch my altruistic 'benefit the shopping masses' bug...

      It is partly altruism, but it's mostly pride. Amazon provides a voting system where customers can mark whether a specific review was helpful; and as a reviewer, you can watch your tally rise if people find your reviews useful. If you take it really seriously, you can make it into the Top 1,000 reviewers where

    • Re:Why tag? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 )
      As several other people have already noted, the main incentives to review on Amazon are egoboo plus a desire to be influential. There are people like the controversial Harriet Klausner who post several reviews a day, every day of the year, and many people are skeptical that these people can actually have read all the books they are reviewing. It's also common to hear stories about people gaming the system, e.g., professors getting their grad students to write glowing reviews of their books.

      I run a site (se

    • Re:Why tag? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by akgw ( 896515 )
      I think that is a fear the is inherrent in all feedback systems, but if you want to see one that 'just works', you have to look no further than eBay. It just seems to be the more you put into the system, the more you get out of it.

  • Like the Reviews (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <thguorw.wodahs>> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:08PM (#14039739) Homepage Journal
    I wonder if they are worried about having to keep the tagging system in check (much like the Family Circus review from a few years back). For instance, what happens when a "Lemur" tag is placed on every Monty Python item?
    • I was thinking much along the same lines. How long until people use tags so that searching for books about homosexuality or atheism returns a list of very conservative christian propaganda. What about tagging all the books about creationism with the "evolution" tag?.
      What I really fear is that groups are going to use this system to censor information or entertainment they don't agree with by polluting the tag system so that every signle search returns 110 versions of the king james bible.
  • Has Amazon patented this yet? If not, what prior art can act as an obstacle?

  • Gmail? (Score:1)

    by noz ( 253073 )
    Is this akin to Gmail's labels?
    • Yes, because e-mails can have more than one label associated with them.

      No, because you don't get the tag cloud that shows you that a lot of e-mails have a particular tag (sex, for example) by showing that tag in a larger typeface.

  • In future news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:10PM (#14039747) Homepage Journal

    News.com.com will report that Amazon has received a patent "for the ability of a web object to be identified by the site's users' input of short descriptions or keywords."

    As an ex-record store owner, I stopped selling due to Amazon's competitive pricing and selection. I'm a fan of competition, yet the music scene I catered to is completely gone as stores like mine ran the street teams that grew the movements.

    Now, Amazon finds a great way to cut salaries by skipping the need for hiring description editors. Still good for the consumer, and in the long run everyone will do better with the savings they reap, creating new and interesting markets.

    I forsee this heavy competition leading to manufacturer direct sales, completed cutting Amazon out. They have to be very careful in offering not just cheap and fast, but great return policies and strong user customization of the sites.

    • Still good for the consumer, and in the long run everyone will do better with the savings they reap, creating new and interesting markets.

      Technically...

      According to economic theory, salaries of people like "description editors" are sunk costs- they are costs that do not increase or decrease in relation to the sales of the books they describe.

      Since presumably Amazon is already pricing the product at the optimal point where they can charge the most and still keep a decent volume of sales (see http://en.w [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:In future news... (Score:3, Informative)

        by dada21 ( 163177 ) *
        I'm on of the few who dispute the economic equilibrium theory. As an Austrian economist, I hold a stronger belief in Mises' evenly rotating economy (ERE). Reading any writings on time preference [lewrockwell.com] helps dispel the thought behind EE.

        Since presumably Amazon is already pricing the product at the optimal point

        This is a bad presumption. My record store sold everything at keystone (100% over cost). Most Amazon prices were 20%. Some small sites sold at 5%.

        . But my point is- the consumer isn't going to benefit.

    • As an ex-record store owner, I stopped selling due to Amazon's competitive pricing and selection. I'm a fan of competition, yet the music scene I catered to is completely gone as stores like mine ran the street teams that grew the movements.

      I had no idea Amazon messed up niche music scenes. Has online music from non-RIAA sources (such as the "A few alternatives" list" on this [eff.org] page) somewhat reversed that? I thought online music would somehow help new music movements gain more widespread popularity fast

  • Just a guess, after the latest Amazon dumb patent ...

  • Only wait for the patent. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nukeindia.com ( 463153 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:14PM (#14039773)
    It may well prove to be the most visible example of a company incorporating tags as a way to bring order to information

    It may well prove the end of any other company legally be able to incorporate tags as a way to bring order to information.

    Never expect Amazon to show the community any innovative (or non-innovative) way to do anything. They are there only to block advancement by patenting anything they use and aggressively enforcing it.

  • Keywords with a new name (Score:5, Interesting)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:17PM (#14039800) Homepage Journal
    Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome.
    • Keytags! (Damn, should have patented that. But damn, the .com is taken.)

    • Re:Keywords with a new name (Score:5, Informative)

      by dslauson ( 914147 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @08:03PM (#14040090) Journal
      "Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome."
      OK, funny, but you, and a lot of other people seem to be missing the point. If a webmaster comes up with a few keywords for a page or item or whatever, that's the old-school way.

      The cool thing about tagging is that it is allowing the unwashed masses to categorize stuff. It sort of casts aside the idea of a rigid heirarchy of categories, and uses a "free association" style of categorization.

      I think it kind of remains to be seen how useful this will be in aiding people's shopping, especially if you're looking for something specific. Still, I think it's a great idea to harness free manpower from the populace to perform tasks that are difficult for a computer to do unaided.

      • The cool thing about tagging is that it is allowing the unwashed masses to categorize stuff. It sort of casts aside the idea of a rigid heirarchy of categories, and uses a "free association" style of categorization.

        Basically, keywords + wiki = tags?
        • Basically, keywords + wiki = tags?

          More like keywords + PageRank (e.g. votes for keywords) = tags. Actually contextual PageRank that Google uses (where they analyze the text around every link into a site) is akin the "tags".

          Of course the folksonomy aspect of it isn't mandatory. Flickr is held up as one of the primary examples of tags, yet the vast majority of photo tags are added by the photo "owners" themselves, just like the days of old with webpages and meta keywords. So you end up with nonsense like this [flickr.com]
    • Consider the number of people who run like heck when they hear anything that sounds vaguely technical.

      Now which sounds more technical: keywords or tags?

      Sometimes the name is important.

      "I think so, Brain, but if they called them 'Sad Meals,' kids wouldn't want them."

    • Oooh... When you rename a technology, it becomes totaly new and awsome.

      Surprisingly, yes! A keyword and a tag appear to be the same -- it's just a word and it becomes associated with whatever it's attached to. However, when you ask someone to tag an object, like a photo, book, or a person, they end up thinking about the problem differently. Instead of distilling it down to ways that people would find that particular product via a search, they think about categorization, and that makes all the difference

  • Tags and "smart folders" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsborg ( 111459 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:18PM (#14039806) Homepage
    The concept of "tagging" extends "smart folders" (smart folders being tags that a user puts on their own files) by allowing you to see other people's tag metadata. The problem with this, of course, is going to be when people start making activism based tags...

    Interesting thing to see if they come up with some "moderation system"... perhaps a way for the users to validate and agree upon said tags? Or will they just say if enough people say the same/similar thing... it must be true?

    • This may be useful for outright abuse, but you will have moderation wars when someone labels Anne Coulter's new book as "right-wing propoganda" or Al Franken's as "liberal whining". There is no best case in this situation; if everyone cancels each other out, then the tag stands. If one ideology dominates, then bias will become quickly evident.

  • Tags useful, but for books? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by seathunter ( 931361 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:19PM (#14039817) Homepage
    Tagging is really useful for collaborative categorizing of unstructured sets of items such as images (as shown on Flickr). However, in the case of books the system is already quite well-structured -- all books have unique identifiers (ISBNs) and each book belongs to one or more pre-defined (the Dewey classification system), so it will be really interesting to see if "anarchistic tagging" can bring some gains to an area previously dominated by "expert classification" (the Dewey system). Compare with the case of Wikipedia ("collaborative and anarchistic") v.s. Encyclopædia Britannica ("expert and controlled").
    • "expert classification" (the Dewey system)

      I could of sworn most larger libraries used the Library of Congress Classification system [wikipedia.org].
    • Not every book has a Dewey Decimal number, not every dewey decimal number is in amazon's database (they don't even have a full set of weight/dimension data), and dewey decimal doesn't even do everything tags do.

      A tag could tell me if this book is part of the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, and searching by that tag could net me a list of all books in the series. Dewey Decimal can't do that.
    • Listen to this speech
      Ontology is Overrated by Clay Shirky (from ITConversations creat site!).

      Then if you look at the 200 Religion [tnrdlib.bc.ca] category in the Dewey decimal system you will most likely see a tad bit of unbalancedness. Out of 100 classification slots there are more that are unused than that are allocated to non-Christian religions. A quick overview suggests that a majority of them actually has "Christianity" explicitely in the name or implicitely by being about eg Jesus. Now this may work well in the US,
    • Sometimes when I go to the huge used bookstore by my house, I can't find what I'm looking for, just because I have no idea what genre some publisher monkey wanted to force that book to be in. Try House of Leaves [amazon.com], or such, what genre is it? Fiction? Sci-Fi? Horror? Or even authors who right across genres but are popular for one, hence all of Stephen King's Gunslinger books being thrown into horror, same with some of Koontz' fiction.

      Then we have the older books just thown into literature. What the heck
  • Amazon's (statistically improbable phrases) and [amazon.com] CAPs [amazon.com] (capitalized phrases) plus their concordance [amazon.com] (alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book) are excellent web2.0 tidbits.

    These semantic baubles should be dangled from blogs as much as tags should be glued into amazon records.

    There's an example here [amazon.com] (with the concordance and text stats linked half way down).

    If only they were as good with their deliveries (after a three week wait in 2003 I gave up on them)

    DK

  • Or every Tom Clancy, Phillip K Dick and Harold Pinter?
  • I wonder if they plan to integrate this tagging idea to their newly launched web mapping service.

    (This hasn't been on /.'s mainpages, but Amazon added a map service earlier this month, you can read more about it [slashgisrs.org].)

  • Tags and commerce. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jbum ( 121617 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:33PM (#14039900)
    Personally I welcome this, but with some trepidation. My coverpop system uses Amazon's web services
    to build interactive mosaics [coverpop.com].

    Currently their search system tends to produce a lot of irrelevent results, because
    vendors tag their own products, and unscrupulous vendors tend to assign misleading tags.
    For example, when I tried to build a "harry potter" mosaic, I got a ton of search results
    that had nothing to do with harry potter.

    A collaborative tagging system has the potential to produce more accurate results, especially
    if there is a system in place for users to collaboratively give weight to tags, similar to
    Slashcode's moderation system. A free tagging system (like Flickr has) is likely to be problematic
    on a system in which is commerce is involved, because there is a huge incentive to abuse it.

  • I originally noticed this on Friday (Score:3, Informative)

    by hansbleep ( 866095 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @07:33PM (#14039901) Homepage
    I posted a screenshot and a few comments to my weblog on this when I noticed it on some of my Amazon sessions last week... Link, if you want to see the screenshot [hansfriedrich.com]

  • Unnecessary bandwagonmanship (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tagging spaces (also called 'folksonomies') are interesting for information retrieval where well understood taxonomies (category hierarchies) don't or can't exist.

    Tags aren't applicable to Amazon's domain because everyone knows how to categorize consumer products. Everyone knows to walk to the Electronics section in Target to pick up the XBox360.

    Nobody goes looking for their XBox 360 in the "blackthings" section or the "overhyped" tagsection.

    Leave folksonomies to categorize the web like http://del [del.icio.us]

  • Yahoo's My Web (Score:2, Informative)

    by ogiller ( 3107 )
    I recently started using Yahoo's My Web 2.0. It makes use of Tags to categorize "Bookmarks".

    I think Tags are a great technology to categorize things into multiple categories. This was previously difficult to do with folders, or priorities. By using tags you can assign both the subject of the item, the source of the item, and the author without having to create specific fields for each of these categories.

    I have started to do this with Yahoo's My Web. If I find an interesting Slashdot article I will tag it w
  • In related news, Amazon started selling vibrators [amazon.com] recently. and another [amazon.com]
  • Every time I hear "tagging" I think grafitti. The word has negative connotations in this context. :P
  • This sounds very similar to XML. How is it different?

  • Porn? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Grendel Drago ( 41496 ) on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @08:50PM (#14040351) Homepage
    Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn. Anyone? Damn it, when will I be able to satisfy my desire of finding tattooed girls with brightly-dyed hair wearing jog bras and boxers? It can't just be me, can it?
    • to hell with that a/c post below this.. im with you man. you know of any good sites that provide that kinda stuff besides suicidegirls? haha. bright redheads in boxers with tattos are HOTTTTTT. hahah.
      late,
      - frank
    • NSFW, of course, Porn.a.licious, all you had to do is search /., it was the first thing in Google.

      I think its even maintained by a fellow /, drone.
    • Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn.

      Your comment just reminded me to look up Cleveland Steamer [urbandictionary.com] after hearing it mentioned on Family Guy. That show is so friggin' demented.

  • It seems to me that using del.icio.us and GreaseMonkey to tag a URL and then display those tags makes more sense than every site creating its own implementation.

    A centralized tagging service (think hoodwink.d, if anyone knows what I'm talking about) means that it's easy to get connections between those tags (jump to Flickr straight from Amazon, for example). And of course, it doesn't need to be centralized; you could just as easy run your own tag server for private things, or subscribe to interest-specific

  • I have stopped using amazon ever since they openly admitted to changing prices based on what they thought your income was. So for instance, if you did searches for medical books or law books, they assumed you were a wealthy doctor or lawyer and thus every item you looked up after that had the price cranked up.

    heres the proof:

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/24/ramasastry.websi te.prices/ [cnn.com]
  • You must be kidding calling "tagging" a "technology". Tagging is as ancient as the Chinese and Egyptians and has been used on computers as long as there have been computers.

    The problem with tagging is that it's about as much fun as sorting a dropped deck of punchcards; people just don't do it unless they are getting paid for it or have absolutely no choice. For example, professional photographers tag because they lose lots of sales otherwise.

    And before anyone files the obvious patent, automatic tagging ha
  • I thought great idea for a second when I thought they were going to POS tag books (seens how theyre scanning them anyway) but then i read the article and realised that its basically rubbish.

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