Joshua Schachter founder of del.icio.us. In 2001, a wonky Wall Street quantitative analyst named Joshua Schachter had a problem.
In the late 1990s, he'd started a website called Memepool, which was a simple collection of Web links that he had found interesting, useful, or both. Over time, as Memepool's users began sending in links they thought the site should feature, Schachter's personal list of bookmarked Web pages grew to more than 20,000 entries, far more than any folder system could handle. To bring some order to the chaos, Schachter wrote an application called Muxway, which allowed him to manage his links by giving each a short label, or tag--enabling him to call up all the pages that were tagged, say, "Wi-Fi" or "math.
" People continued to view Schachter's list of interesting links; but now, because of Muxway, those links were organized around tags. Pretty soon, about ten thousand people every day were stopping by. Human Communication Technologies Lab. AbstractStatement of IntentReference MaterialsContact Information Social bookmarking systems enable participants to store and classify digital information using keywords or tags.
This process of classifying data/information about information (metadata) into categories is called tagging. Consumer Health Vocabulary Initiative.