Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Amazon Pulls the 19-0 Book But Not Before Pats Haters Abuse the Tag Function
byStephanie Stradley, from Fanhouse.com reports on an interesting effect of tagging in Web 2.0. Amazon.com had begun pre-selling a book entitled ”19-0: The Historic Championship Season of the Unbeatable Patriots” before the game was even played (Note, Amazon has taken the page down as of 2/6/08, but you can still see the cached page on Google...). Of course, it has been pulled now in the aftermath of the New York Giants improbable victory, but not before Giants fans and other Patriot haters used the tagging function to express their views on the team that came oh-so-close to perfection.
Amazon.com uses the Web 2.0 concept of Folksonomy, which is the practice of allowing users to create and manage tags to annotate and categorize content. People browsing on Amazon can create and apply their own tags to the items, adding to the meta data and making searching for a particular item easier and faster. At least, that’s what it is supposed to do. In certain rare instances, however, it can be used more mischievously. In the case of the ”19-0: The Historic Championship Season of the Unbeatable Patriots” book, users quickly found it and tagged it with “cheaters,” “fiction,” “dewey defeats truman” and “hubris.” A screen shot of the (now removed) listing is below.
While the users were obviously using the tagging network as a way to insult or poke fun at the Patriots, it actually does provide a very good example of the power of social tagging. In this case, tying the famously incorrect banner headline on the front page of the first edition of the Chicago Tribune is actually appropriate. Both represent media gaffes where the outcome of an event was so predictable that they didn’t wait for it to actually happen first. And with the general non-Patriot fan perception of the Patriots after the SpyGate scandal, a search on Amazon for “cheaters” and “NFL” should realistically return some results that include the 2007 Patriots season. It may not be pretty (if you are a Pats fan), but it works…
