Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us spoke twice at the Berkman Center yesterday. I blogged the first session, but I was moderating the second so I couldn't. Both sessions I thought were excellent: Joshua is a low signal-to-noise communicator, he's working on important issues, and I find his point of view unpredictable (which is a good thing).

Here's some of what I thought was especially interesting. (Warning: Miscellaneous list ahead:)

Delicious is adding social networking. You'll be able to designate people as members of your "network" so you can keep up with what they're tagging and you'll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups'/network's use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences...something to look forward to.

Delicious is not going to go after the enterprise market. Instead, eventually Joshua will make an open source version available. I was surprised by this since I've been talking about tagging with a fair number of large companies who are excited about it and would buy a version of Delicious for internal use. Joshua thinks he couldn't charge enough. I think they'd pay substantial sums for it.

Joshua's elevator pitch says that Delicious is about remembering stuff. I continue to think its success is due to its social nature. The disagreement is one of emphasis only. But if I were his marketing vp, I'd tell him to market the tagstreams, not the bookmarks or the tags. Of course, I have no data supporting my view, but I was never that sort of marketing vp (i.e., reality-based).

The rate of tag spam seems incredibly low: A couple of incidents a week. (Tag spam means someone tags a page with hundreds or thousands of tags so that people will come to it.) In part, said Joshua, that's because tag spam brings you no google juice.

He is not using stemming software that recognizes "blog," "blogging" and "blogs" all have the same stem in part because there is meaning to the variants and in part because he hasn't found any that's good enough.

A little thing: I learned last night that if you use the tag "for:someone," that bookmark is sent to the Delicious user with the name "someone."

By the way, the evening session will be available as a podcast sometime soon. I'll let you know. [Tags: delicious JoshuaSchachter berkman tagging]