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.