Talk:Joshua Schachter

[edit] Schachter invented tags?

The Business Week article says that Schachter introduced tagging about two years ago. Yet tagging (as a UI concept, as an actual implementation, and as a more loosely defined framework of plural categorization) has existed for many years prior to that, in both web and client application contexts - one huge, online example that's been around since at least 2001 is Getty Images (Photodisc). Maybe one could say that he "popularized" the use of tags within social media applications, but it's difficult even to quantify del.icio.us' relative popularity or influence. Montecristosandwich 12:21, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Joshua invented the use of tags as we know them. He advised Flickr to use tags as well. I think time will show that he was the key innovator here. Tags were a departure from the classical partitioning theory which file-systems used to categorize media into disjoint sets. The cognitive scientists including George Lakoff, Eleanor Rosch and philosophers - specifically Wittgenstein - had observed the phenomena. They observed that folk categorization tended to classify things as variants of exemplar objects called 'prototypes' and that there was a tendency to for people to colloquially cluster things into 'sets' or 'families' with voluntary membership. However Joshua brought this idea to the web. The key feature of the idea is 'voluntary categorization' which I don't see Getty Images doing. anselmhook

Using kewords was common; using a partially constrained set of keywords and showing that list to you in immediate feedback was new. That said, I'm not sure I'm sufficiently notable for a wikipedia entry. -- JoshuaSchachter

I would like this article to contain tales of how he used to optimize people's Perl programs for them in roughly 25 seconds. I demand a rewrite. --br0d