At corebasis.com, Henning von Vogelsang modestly presents his initiative to use an asterisk as a semantic reference for “source:”
Recent history taught us, if something is simple, makes sense and it is easy to use, it will most likely become a standard. … Through the increasing expansion of Twitter, the at-sign (@) has become a standard reference for a sender’s name. … Another change (introduced 2007) was the usage of hashtags (#). …
To help distinguish the source of information from a person, I propose we start using the following pattern:
- @name
- #tag
- *source
[tags]semantics, micro, asterisk, proposal[/tags]
