“For the past several years, ReadWriteWeb has been using Delicious in a way that I think points to the potential the service truly had. Here’s what we did”:

• We had a researcher grab URLs for companies and products that ReadWriteWeb had written about already and look them up in Delicious to see who had bookmarked those same links first.
• Then we scrolled back through the bookmarking history for each link to find the first 20 people who tagged the URL in question.
• We then grabbed the usernames of those 20 people and pasted them into a spreadsheet.
• We repeated that process more than 300 times.
• Then we sorted the names in the spreadsheet and identified 15 people who on 5 or more occasions were among the first 20 people to bookmark a link that ReadWriteWeb later wrote about.
• Then we subscribed to the RSS feeds of all those peoples’ bookmarks in the future. We regularly find things that way before our competitors do.