This Businessweek article says “the power of del.icio.us stems from the clicking keyboards of its many members. The service was a homegrown project created in late 2003 by Joshua Schachter, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, to track and share bookmarks. As the system took off, Schachter quit his job and raised venture funding. Now, 200,000 subscribers busily label online articles, blog postings, and more. They use tags like “katrina,” often adding comments such as “Pictures of before and after. Very good.” The process creates a mountain of information subscribers can explore.Now, companies are figuring out ways to take advantage of this phenomenon. As they tag, subscribers end up collectively highlighting changing trends and raging discussions all available at the del.icio.us site. Increasingly, innovative advertisers and other companies are trying to make sense of these discussions”.

Tagging: Keeping Tabs On The Net