[Lancaster] #hashtags -- was: Re: linux user group

[Richard Smedley]

andy baxter wrote:
> I have never used twitter, so don't really understand what a hashtag is 
> - some kind of category for gathering posts from different feeds?

It's really the same as the tags you add to posts
in WordPress/Drupal/Flickr etc., but in microblogs
like Twitter & Identi.ca, with their 140 Char limit,
they're created in-post by putting the # in front
of a word. This creates a link to a search for
that hashtag in the post.

For example if you look at
http://twitter.com/RichardSmedley/statuses/4694047854
you'll see that #tal09 is a link. Clicking on it
shows pages of #tal09 posts from the last week.
[#tal09 is the tag for this year's Talk About
Local Unconference]

You can also search for #tal09 & other hashtags
(and, indeed, any word(s) - it doesn't have to
be a hashtag) at:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23tal09

Third party services, like hashtag.org, add more
functionality. You can use widgets in Drupal &
WordPress to extract feeds of a particular hashtag.
Note that doing this unmoderated carries a certain risk ;)

At some conferences some 50-100% of attendees are
tweeting during the talks. Some speakers embrace
this back-channel, streaming the tweets across the
top of the projector screen, and employing a moderator
to write out interesting ones and pass them across
to the speaker for instant inter-action.

To see things in real time, go to http://twitterfall.com/
tomorrow night at 10.40pm, and search for #bbcqt...

Regards,

  - Richard

-- 
http://twitter.com/RichardSmedley
- food & gardening tweets displacing occasional bits of techie talk.

http://twitter.com/hsNW
- #hackspace tweets for NW England & N Wales