Women Writers Are a Hot Topic on Amazon.com

PRLog (Press Release) – Dec 25, 2007 – Did you know that women writers is one of the most popular tags on Amazon.com? The tag "women writers" is used over nine-thousand times (actually 9,452 as of Christmas day) to label an Amazon product. How many Amazon customers use this tag? Well, it’s nearly 750 (745 to be precise).

Not surprisingly, the five top Amazon products that are tagged as women writers are all books written by women. Here are these top 5 tagged books on December 25th:

1. Peony in Love by Lisa See (4 stars, 57 reviews)
2. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (3.5 stars, 167 reviews)
3. Earrings of Ixtumea by Kim Baccellia (4.5 stars, 7 reviews)
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston (4 stars, 390 reviews)
5. The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross (4.5 stars, 31 reviews)

You can view Amazon's current list of products tagged women writers here:
http://www.amazon.com/tag/women%20writers/ref=tag_cld_cl ...

The tag women is even more popular. It is used 15,225 times by 2383 Amazon customers. Once again, all five products are books, but two of the books are authored by men and three are authored by women.

Here are the top 5 Amazon products tagged as women:

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (4.5 stars, 895 reviews)
2. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson (5 stars, 498 reviews)
3. The Secret Lives of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (4 stars, 1316 reviews)
4. The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross (4.5 stars, 31 reviews)
5. A Danish Photographer Of Idaho Indians: Benedicte Wrensted by Joanna Cohan Scherer (5 stars, 2 reviews)

You can view Amazon's current list of products tagged women here:
http://www.amazon.com/tag/women/ref=tag_cld_cl_itdp_t_6

Most of Amazon’s popular tags are related to books. These include: childrens books, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, fiction, romance, adventure, nonfiction, historical fiction, history, paranormal romance, vampire, and mystery. Then, there are several popular tags related to electronics 1080p (for high definition tv), blueray, and dvd.

What are tags? Amazon says “Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find items on the Amazon site as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify items for later recall.”

Amazon's tagging system is an example of a folksonomy. Wikipedia defines a folksonomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy) as "the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. ...[Labels] are generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content."

Here is Amazon's tag cloud, which is a list of all of their most popular tags. Frequently used tags are shown in larger type while recently used tags use darker type.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/cloud/ref=tag_cloud_more/002-2783709-3748008?ie=UTF8&length=250