Fred Wilson led a group that invested in del.icio.us:
del.icio.us is a really interesting web service that lets anyone who uses it “tag the internet”.
Most people, me included, go there for the first time, look at del.icio.us, and then shake their heads and say “I don’t get it”.
But for those who come back and actually use it, the experience is very different.
del.icio.us becomes a critical tool for them to manage their web experiences.
Simply put, tagging is the exercise of associating words, any words you want to use, with URLs. That’s all it is – a series of words and URLs. The words are the tags. But when lots of people start tagging with a similar tool and similar words, and the tags are shared, some very interesting things result.
I like to send people to the del.icio.us tag page to see what that result is.
del.icio.us made tagging popular, but others have used it with incredible results. The most obvious example is Flickr. I believe that tags and RSS feeds of the tags has made Flickr vastly superior to other photo sharing sites.
RSS feeds make tagging even more powerful. Because everyone’s tag can be an RSS feed, tagging becomes extremely viral and portable.
