the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I was reading and had an idea about user entered tags, and other user-derived metadata. I am referring to data such as "users who viewed this object also looked at these objects" or "users who purchased this also purchased that" sort of information. Or "user X says this list of items go together". It is another way to tagging, I supposed, figuring out what items are related by passive means (at least with the first two examples.) Basically just poking around in your database for interesting correlations. Amazon.com is obviously the leader in this space. I can imagine a system that can take advantage of freeform text tags, and user-derived metadata would be very powerful. The focus would be on intelligent analysis of the data. Or maybe not. Perhaps just making the data available is enough to inpsire creative use of it.