Everything I Know About Anything

Del.icio.us and the Advent of Tagging

Created by a random person as a hobby and now bought by Yahoo. It is widely considered the advent of tagging and so-called social bookmarking. Everything in Web2.0 is obsessed with "social" networking. Social this, social that, maybe it'll get me some venture capital. Hence, the second tech bubble.

But as del.icio.us is the first it actually works very well. Since picking it up I've actually begun bookmarking sites on a regular basis. Before if I found a useful, fun, or informative site I would just try and memorize the URL or remember how I had gotten to the site. IE, and then Firefox's bookmarking systems kind of sucked. Kind of still do.


Here is a screenshot of my del.icio.us page. I've selected the tag "tech," and as you see, the panels on the right show related tags, and a list of ALL of my tags. By the way, the photo is hosted at Flickr, another ostensibly Web2.0 site, also originally a startup that was later bought by Yahoo.

Del.icio.us's power comes from the fact that its content and dichotomy is totally user generated, and this allows its results for searching for a tag to rival and quite often be better than a traditional search engine. The sites that get posted to del.icio.us are sites that real people actually enjoy using and have selected as one of their favorites.

posted by albert @ 5:06 PM