Were you a student around then? Yeah. Cory Arcangel, who was my professor at the time, introduced me to Del.icio.us. He made everyone in class use it. The first part of class was everyone talking through some links they found on the internet. People would bring in things that may not seem interesting at first, but Cory was amazing at parsing out why something might be interesting. It showed you it’s important to think deeply about why you like what you like. “You’re in college and should be interested in everything” was Cory’s whole point with the link sharing. You have to open your brain to many different things and investigate them. It’s the primary time when you can develop those ideas and habits for the rest of your life. So what happened to Del.icio.us? Yahoo, who owned Del.icio.us, accidentally leaked a slide about their plans to “sunset” Del.icio.us late in 2010. Immediately almost everyone using it was done and left. At that time, John Michael was working at Rhizome, and I was trying to be an artist. We started talking about what a platform would be like that could replace Del.icio.us, or replace our community that we had found on Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize patterns in your own thinking.
