Over at Thingology, Tim's got a great post comparing the tagging features of LibraryThing and Amazon. Taking a random sample of 1,000 ISBNs and running them through both sites, Tim found that LT's books are tagged approximately ten times as much as Amazon's. He's got some very good thoughts on why Amazon's tag-effort has (thus far) been a flop (my favorite: "Amazon is a store, not a personal library or even a club. Organizing its data is as fun as straightening items at the supermarket. It's not your stuff and it's not your job."), and offers some useful suggestions for e-commerce tagging plans work.
For all the time I spend at Amazon, I've never tagged a book there. What's in it for me? If I tag my own books on LT, I can not only easily find subsets of my collection as I need them, but also see who else has used similar tags to my own. I've no need to do anything like that on Amazon, so it's no surprise to me that others don't see the point either.
