No, Amazon isn’t tagging its customers, but apparently, customers are beginning to tag Amazon. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, “tagging” is basically adding pieces of meta-data, descriptive keywords for example, to an object (in Amazon’s case, books and electronics). Right now there are a lot of sites that let their audience do the “tagging,” in an effort to harness the collective descriptive power of the community.) A few months back, I surmised that Amazon was entering the realm of tagging with features like “Capitalized Phrases” and “Statistically Improbable Phrases.” Now they are allowing customers to add descriptors to book pages. Apparently Amazon is still testing this out, so if you can’t see it yet (and you want to), go to Kokogiak where he’s got the full rundown including links to screenshots.
I also noticed that Amazon has expanded slightly on its wildly popular “Amazon.com Sales Rank” feature. Now you can see where the book in question ranked yesterday compared to today. For example, as of this writing, The Kite Runner is ranked at “#16 in books,” while yesterday it ranked “#17 in books.”
