I was in an Oxlo board meeting recently and Todd Vernon (Raindance CTO who is on the Oxlo board) said “I’ve subscribed to your del.icio.us tag feed – I like it more than your blog because it tells me what you are thinking about. I was mulling this over when a few days later I saw Jason Calacanis’ Wired & Tired post where he called out “subscribing to Fred’s blog” as Tired but “subscribing to Fred’s del.icio.us feed” as Wired. Jason used almost the same phrase as Todd – “I prefer to read what Fred is *considering* blogging about.”
It dawned on me that my del.icio.us tag is akin to the first derivative of what I’m thinking about. For a while, I struggled with tagging stuff as I didn’t get the benefit. Now, I tag everything I read on line that I find interesting and am finding myself referencing my del.icio.us tags regularly to find stuff that I’d tagged a few days earlier (rather than going to Google and doing a new search – hmmm.)
I went ahead and FeedBurnered my del.icio.us tag feed so it’d be easy to subscribe to. FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost feature made it easy for me to put the most recent tags up on my blog (on the left hand column – I chose to list the last 10). del.icio.us’s new Tagroll let me quickly put a nifty tag cloud up on my blog also (on the right hand column).