Needles in Haystacks
One night, I was flipping through the channels and hit the local public access channel, which featured a show by a local musician. The production was, um... quirky, to say the least, so when the ending credits to the show gave his homepage URL, I tagged it in del.icio.us and forgot about it. I was just looking for something else in my old bookmarsk and ran into that old bookmark and noticed that another del.icio.us user had tagged the same URL. You have to wonder what posesses two people in the universe to bookmark the homepage of an obscure impresario of the Chapman Stick, or at least I had to wonder. The impressive thing is that as I went back through his bookmarks, I noticed that we apparently share a number of interests (not necessarily things I've tagged, but I found his bookmarks interesting), aside from the obvious professional interests and chapman stick, Lisp, syndication, neural networks, biblical history, securities trading (well, that subject was much more interesting when any idiot could make money at it), and, most oddly, vaccines, specifically, possible dangers thereof. This was something my wife and I looked into a few years ago after Elaina had a severe reaction to her 4 month DPT vaccination.
As far as I'm concerned, the social benefit of del.icio.us comes from exploring the explicit relations created by others through tags. I find it very odd to find a number of coinciding interests through some totally obscure relation.