Anne Truitt Zelenka

Prior to adding tech blogging to my mom blogging action, I had heard of del.icio.us but hadn’t considered using it. Once I started subscribing to tech blogs and reading them on a regular basis, I couldn’t escape the hype. I’ve begun using it but I have to wonder: what’s the big deal? So I can store my bookmarks online. I like that. But I gather from my reading that the social aspects of del.icio.us, the sharing of tags and the public categorizing of web content, are what is exciting to those who say Web 2.0 is so 2005. On this score, I am not impressed. I don’t feel a great need to look at what other people are tagging. I have plenty of ways of finding what I want on the web; I don’t need yet another that reproduces what the so-called digerati think is important.I’m more consumer than early adopter. Yes, I’m tech savvy, having worked as a programmer for almost ten years. But I don’t use tech just because it’s fun. I use it if it improves my life. The Performancing Firefox extension I’m using right now improves my life. It makes it an order of magnitude more pleasant and efficient to write a blog post. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be blogging this right now. But so far del.icio.us hasn’t made my life significantly better than it was before. I might argue it has made it worse because every time I type del.icio.us I have to stop and think of where the dots go.

Here’s what a VC guy has to say about this:

… many of the emerging web services are actually only being used by a small subset of the total overall internet population – the extreme techie set. Of course, by definition, early adopters come first. But I wonder if many of the recently launched services emerging are consciously (or more likely, subconsciously) “digerati-facing” services, as opposed to true “consumer-facing” services. While a nice mention in a high-profile tech blog will jump-start a start-up site, that exposure doesn’t necessarily translate into widespread usage.

I wonder, how many folksonomy web sites can the online world support? Is this something worth the time and money being put into it?