User Tagging Is Fundamental
Earlier this week a fact checker from New York Magazine called me to ask a few questions about Union Square Ventures. Apparently we are in the next issue in a story about influential technology people in NYC.
She read me a sentence or two about why del.icio.us is an important and influential web service. I honestly couldn't understand the sentence even though she read it several times over to me.
I told her, "del.icio.us is important because it allows the users to tag the Internet. It's a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet."
We made our investment in del.icio.us just over a year ago and it was sold to Yahoo! over four months ago but we still think about it every day. Not del.icio.us the investment. That has come and gone. But del.icio.us the service.
Let me repeat a piece of what I told the fact checker from NY Magazine.
User tagging is a fundamental piece of the Internet
Publishers/content creators will tag their content to a degree and they will do more and more of it over time as they realize the importance of meta data in the discovery and consumption of their product. But "self tagging" as we call it will only get the Internet so far.
User tagging is vastly superior to self tagging because it is the consumers who are navigating and trying to find the stuff. The way they describe it is the same way they will try to find it. And it's really hard for publishers to figure out all the keywords up front.
In the venture capital business, you often learn more from your investments than they learn from you. I think that was and is clearly the case with del.icio.us. Thanks Joshua.
May 3, 2006 08:36 AM, By Fred Wilson
Tags: content delicious discovery navigation selftagging tagging usertagging
Comments (4)
Fred,
There are at least four different groups of people that you can empower to organize information on the internet. Traditional search engines empower (1) the content creators by indexing the words in the web page and/or the key words or tags provided by the content author. This group obviously has a huge incentive to abuse the system and manipulate the rankings (e.g SEO and spam).
The second group are (2) editors who are hired to manually sort through the Internet. The problems here are that (a) they can't anticipate all the ways that users may want to look for information, and (b) they don't economically scale.
The third group of people are (3) other authers who link to various web pages. This is the google link popularity technique and is similar to the age-old citation analysis of academic papers. It fails to work, however, in closed or rapidly changing environments where people can't or don't create links, such as news, classifieds and FAQ listings.
The fourth group are (4) the users themselves. By looking at how this group of people interacts with the information on the Internet, one can intuit how best to organize information. There are a variety of ways to capture this information, and simply asking people to provide it they way del.icio.us does is just one method of getting it.
Just some food for thought...
Gary
Posted by Gary Culliss , May 7, 2006 06:02 PM
>>This group obviously has a huge incentive to abuse the system and manipulate the rankings (e.g SEO and spam).
I agree with this 100% !
Tagging or things like social bookmarks are used by spammers for several month
Posted by Amanda , July 10, 2006 07:52 AM
<<such as news, classifieds and FAQ listings.
so i think this is a very important factor. SEO and Spam are a big problem for all which searching for information. But i think good content will always be on top.
Posted by Anna , July 19, 2006 08:56 AM
From a VC perspective, what do you think this says about all of the companies out there advocating automated ontology discovery and the link? To me, it says that these are going to be nothing more than "suggests" to the actual user feedback on content.
Posted by matt m , May 7, 2006 02:31 PM