It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo, new owner of social bookmarking and tagging pioneer del.icio.us, tries to bring the whole tagging shebang to the wider marketplace. Here’s an early example of how it might work. PR Newswire, a news release service, has announced a partnership with del.icio.us, to allow visitors to PR Newswire’s public website to tag individual news releases issued by PR Newswire members and post them into their personal profiles on del.icio.us.
The feature appears as a button alongside existing RSS, email and print button above each press release:
Click on the link and it takes you to your del.icio.us account (if you have one) and prepares a new entry. Nothing that revolutionary here, you may say, but I’d suggest that this is one of the first examples of del.icio.us breaking out of the usual blogosphere world. PR Newswire is, after all, for journalists, who are not known for their passion for things nerdy.
Of course, it’s a great way for PR Newswire to spread their news releases around, as the press release itself admits:
Once posted in a personal Del.icio.us profile, the news release is accessible to the thousands of users who search Del.icio.us for information regularly.
Indeed, this is one of the great strengths and weaknesses of del.icio.us. On the one hand it’s great to see what other people are tagging, and to get access to a live list of the latest exciting websites. On the other hand, how soon is this list going to be polluted — if it’s not already — by people promoting their own stuff or just by people tagging stuff that’s not very interesting? The irony of del.icio.us, in my view, is that it was wonderful while it was being used by people in the know, but it becomes less useful the more popular it gets and everyone starts tagging American Idol and Britney Spears websites.
That said, the popular feed of del.icio.us remains as nerdy as ever.