Tags are words that Amazon customers use to label entities on Amazon. Entities can be items for sale, Listmania lists, people, guides, images, and so forth. Tags enable customers to create their own organization of items. For example, a customer might tag many items as "PresentsForMom," or "WorkItems," or "DigitalCameras." Customers tag items using user interface tools located on Amazon's retail web site.
Tags can be as generic or as personal as the customer wants. For example, different customers might label the same book, "Romantic fiction," or "JohnSmith's pick." Each entity can aggregate as many non-repetitive tags as customers supply.
Tags can be:
A customer can search on a tagger's name to find items they tagged as, for example, good, bad, or interesting. In this way, a customer can use a tagger for recommendations.
Customers can also share their tagging with friends for a variety of reasons, for example, to suggest gifts: "ForMyBirthday," "JohnnysGraduationPresent," and so forth.
To find items according to their tags, use the TagLookup operation with, optionally, one of the tag response groups:
TaggedGuides—Returns all guides labeled by a specified tag.
TaggedItems—Returns all items labeled by a specified tag.
TaggedListmaniaLists—Returns all Listmania lists labeled by a specified tag.
Tags—Returns extensive information about an items tags, including the first time an item was tagged, the last time an item was tagged, the number of times an item was tagged, and so on.
TagsSummary—Returns all entities labeled with a specified tag.
In the tag-related response groups, Tags and TagSummary specify the amount of informtion returned. The other tag-related response groups, TaggedGuides, TaggedItems, and Tagged ListmaniaLists, specify the kind of entity tagged.
For example, the following request searches for entities tagged with the word, "GeorgesBestBooks."
http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml? Service=AWSECommerceService& AWSAccessKeyId=[Access Key ID]& AssociateTag=[Associate Tag]& Operation=TagLookup& ItemId=0545010225& ResponseGroup=Tags& Marketplace=us& Version=2008-04-07& TagName=GeorgesBestBooks