Twitter hashtags are the strange little oddities that you find on
lots of tweets, and they use the hash symbol # followed by something
else, so an example would be #cilip. They're very useful, but can be a
bit puzzling, so let's shine a light on them.
The first thing to
know about hashtags is that they are entirely informal. They're not
something that Twitter has instituted, and there are very few 'rules'
about how they are used. Actually scratch that - there are no rules at
all, just a general code of practice. You don't have to ask any
permission to use them, there's no central authority, and you can use
them pretty much however you'd like to.
Why do they exist? Well,
suppose that you're interested in a particular subject, conference,
television programme, event or other similar 'thing'. If anyone you
follow tweets about it, the chances are that you'll see it, but what
about all the other folk who are also talking about the same thing who
you don't follow? You'll be missing all their tweets and information.
Now, you can of course do a search at any number of search engines to
try and find appropriate information, but how do you find it? There are
plenty of different ways that you can refer to something - in short,
there's no controlled vocabulary. However, if people can agree on a
specific word to use in their tweets, this can in part be overcome, as
you can just search for that word, and to enhance, or emphasis it, the #
helps identify the keyword even more. Consequently, you can then just
search for #keyword and you'll see all the tweets that people are
writing, all gathered together in one place.
A second way in which
tweets are used is to emphasis something - it's almost like writing in
bold or italics - people don't really expect you to search for similar
tweets, they're just making their own personal point, such as
#gladitsfriday although sometimes these hashtags do seem to take on a
life of their own, and you'll find that other people start to use them -
I see #latenightlibrarian quite often for example.
You may also
find that people will use a specific hashtag to gather a series of
tweets together if they're running a training course, just to make it
easy for everyone to see what everyone is up to.
There are of
course disadvantages to this system. Since it's unofficial and people
make it up as they go along, you'll find that the same event can be
referred to by any number of hashtags, which kind of defeats the point
really! The television show Big Brother might be referred to as #BB or
#BB11 or #BigBrother or #BigBro but generally you'll find that after a
short space of time a common usage will prevail. Some people write
really long hashtags, which I think is illadvised, since every hashtag
character reduces the amount of tweet space you have. This is a
particular irritant with conferences - the conference organisers do seem
to put great store on the year of the conference, but as Twitter is
primarily real time it's pretty obvious that tweets about the conference
are taking place now! There are exceptions obviously, but the shorter
the tag, the better. Ideally a tag should make some sort of sense - a
tweet with #cilip on it is probably going to be about CILIP - a real no
brainer. However, as long as a group of people agree on a tag, it
doesn't matter what it is, that's the delight of the system. Hashtags
also break quite easily, since they only work with a basic character
set, and symbols can break them, since it's only the first part of the
tag that will be recognised, so #Web2.0 would be seen as #Web2. Another
disadvantage is that if spammers see a hashtag trending they can add in
their own spam, together with the tag, and this can be rather
irritating.
There are a few helpful hashtag resources that you can
use. Hashtags.org displays recent
tweets, their content, and has a graph of the use of the term in the
last few days. If you see a tag that you don't understand, What The Trend can help identify
it for you. Twubs does something
similar; it groups tags together, allows you to 'register' (entirely
unofficially and unenforceably) a tag, and it displays popular tags. If
you see a tag and you don't know what it means, try out Tagalus which shows you the definition for a
tag, but again it's worth stressing that it's not official at all. What the Hashtag also does the same
thing.
Conference organisers may wish to make use of resources
such as TweetChat, TwitterFall, or TweetGrid to display the tags real
time.
That's a quick overview - there's more detail at the Twitter FanWiki that you
might want to take a look at as well, but what you've just read should
be enough to get you up and started.
