Shanti’s Dispatches

Wonderin’ what VC Fred Wilson was thinking when he made an investment in del.icio.us?

You can read his thoughts on del.icio.us here:

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.

That’s what happened to me. That’s what happened to Brad. That’s what happened to Charlie.

So we figured we ought to pay some attention to del.icio.us.

What we learned when we dug into it is that “tagging” is a relatively new, but increasingly important, phenomenon on the web.

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.

This was also the first time I’ve seen the del.icio.us tag page. Neat-o.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos