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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Delicious acquisition bodes well for better content discovery

DeliciousSeveral years ago, I was doing some work for a regional tourism and travel organization. Part of the engagement involved spending time with each member of the marketing and communications staff, talking about what they were doing and how they could apply social media to their efforts.

One of the communicators was tasked with marketing the city to the Latino community. She had grown increasingly frustrated using Google to find information on Hispanic tourism, which had turned up precious little. I had her open an account on Delicious, of which she was unaware. Within minutes, we had uncovered a treasure trove of web resources, most of them bookmarked by a single individual. In addition to noting these resources, she subscribed to his Hispanic tourism feeds, which continued to produce new gems over the next several months.

Clearly, there is much more to Delicious than just bookmarking sites for later reference. Used well, Delicious often serves as a far more interesting and revealing content discovery tool than search engines. When you save a page to Delicious, you tag it; this puts the page in a content bucket that includes not just pages you’ve tagged that way, but all the pages that have been assigned the same tag by anybody. The most conscientious contributors don’t stop there. They examine the tags others have used for the same pages and, in many cases, alter their own tags to accommodate the label the community has tacitly agreed to use for that kind of material.

The concept has become known as a “folksonomy,” in which those contributing the bookmarks negotiate the language they’ll use to classify the various kinds of material they’re sharing.

It’s a process at which Delicious excels, but it’s not immediately evident. I was hopeful, when Yahoo acquired Delicious, that the company would take it to the next level. Alas, Yahoo’s biggest contribution to Delicious was to acquire the delicious.com domain so people didn’t have to remember the clever yet arcane del.icio.us URL. Delicious languished, forgotten, under Yahoo’s stewardship until a few months ago the company raised a ruckus when the bookmarking service appeared on a list of sites Yahoo was planning to sunset.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that Delicious is being acquired by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, two of YouTube’s founders. They’ve started a company called AVOS and, according to a statement they made about the acquisition of Delicious, they said their goal is to ” take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.” To me, this suggests they have plans for Delicious that take it beyond its current state.

Information discovery is a critical field given the avalanche of new content added daily to an already overwhelming ocean of material. Search, such as that provided by Google, remains important, but it’s not enough. Some people believe content curation is the answer. I believe it’s an answer, but a variety of alternatives that take new approaches to finding useful stuff amidst all the chaff is the best scenario. Ultimately, we should intuitively know, based on what we’re trying to find, when we’re best off using a search engine, a curated resource or a folksonomy-driven collection (or whatever else emerges). 

I’m excited at the prospect of Delicious evolving into something even more useful and intuitive. I’m also anxious to see what else comes along to ease the discovery of the best content. For entrepreneurs and trailblaerx there are few fields more ripe for innovation.

Mathew Ingram has written a thoughtful post on the acquisition; like pretty much everything Mathew writes, it’s worth your time.

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