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I Met the Programmer Who Invented Tagging. Here’s What He Taught Me About Entrepreneurship.
Yes… someone had to invent tagging!
Tagging things online is something most of us take for granted. We add tags to our Instagram posts. We add tags to our videos. We add tags to the contacts in our CRMs. In other words, all of us are constantly using tags to keep ourselves organized and help find things. And yet, if you’re like me, you probably never once wondered where or how tagging began. But, like all things human-made, someone had to invent it. That person happens to be a programmer and entrepreneur named Joshua Schachter.
Despite the fact that he invented tagging, Joshua is actually best known for creating something else. He was the founder of social bookmarking website del.icio.us back in 2003. The project helped usher in the age of Web 2.0, and it was so popular it was famously acquired by Yahoo! within eight months of launch.
I had an opportunity to interview Joshua for my podcast, Web Masters. The focus of our interview was, of course, del.icio.us. However, during our conversation, Joshua offhandedly mentioned how he’d invented tagging. At the time, I remember thinking, “How cool is that?”
Yes, building and selling a startup like del.icio.us for millions of dollars is amazing. But…
