Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories

In the quest to organize the Web's information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users.

Tags are creating more than straightforward classifications of Web documents or links, said Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us. One of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is "to_read," a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read.

"There is a behavior around tags that has nothing to do with categorization," Schachter said.