One of my favourite things about using twitter is the hashtag as highlighted by this tweet of the two-days-ago.
Tweet of the other Day
Adding a hashtag to a tweet links tweets together. So, earlier this week at the University of Leicester there was a face-to-face seminar to discuss a facebook study carried out there. The hashtag #ormfb was used by those attending or following the event resulting in pages of tweets. Many of the tweets are ‘trivial’ but does that matter? Some aren’t and what’s important as well are the new connections that are being made. I’m not at Leicester, knew nothing of the report but happened to spot #ormfb in a tweet by @AJCann so I asked what it was, and was told by @stujohnson and I then found @jennifermjones who I’d never come across before but now follow!
Hashtags are great for conferences and featured heavily at ALT-C 2008. #altc2008 on twitter: 300+ tweets before, during and after the event. And of course it’s not just twitter and hashtags. The altc2008 tag was used on flickr, blog posts, delicious and no doubt elsewhere. See my conference page for examples.
Another great conference example from @joedale:
Agree absolutely about the utility of hash tags. They added a powerful extra dimension to the online coverage of the Liberal Democrats’ September national conference for example – http://www.libdemvoice.org/twittering-away-4981.html
Agreed. Here’s another example. We recently used the #mmnz08 tag for the MoodleMoot conference held on our campus in Napier. It was used widely in Twitter, but also on Flickr and Delicious.
Now the next step, a Google Hashtag Search that will provide you with results across all platforms (Twitter, Flickr, Delicious etc.). Sort of like Twemes.com http://twemes.com/mmnz08