Web 2.0 Collaboration

The second major difference is that del.icio.us, as a web based system, handles bookmarking and tagging collaboratively. Collaboration is another landmark of Web 2.0 sites. If del.icio.us was merely an alternative to using the browser's capability it would not be very exciting. But because it is a collaborative tool - and only because so many people use it - it becomes a powerful long tail discovery system. All the bookmarks and tags are combined together. In fact, the process of bookmarking a page in del.icio.us presents the popular tags other people have used to describe the same page (these tags can be adopted by simply clicking them). These tags can then be used in reverse. Clicking on one of these tags generates a search of all pages bookmarked with that tag, and the search results display the number of times each page has been bookmarked by other del.icio.us users. Viola! a new form of categorization generated from the use of and terms established by the community. Rather than an editor or an algorithm deciding what pages are most relevant, the community decides.