What’s the Hashtag?
29th May 2009
A few months ago I think my first question might have been, what is a hashtag? So, for anybody still as unenlightened as I was: hashtags are a way of marking your message on Twitter so that it can then be grouped with other messages using the same tag.
That sounds really boring, doesn’t it?
But there have been a number of events that I’ve either attended, watched on telly or even not watched on telly where I’ve also followed the hashtag and found it really useful. For instance, at the recent Digital Inclusion Conference there were a significant number of delegates, and importantly, people who hadn’t been able to attend, who were using the hashtag #ndi09 to follow what was going on across the conference. This form of Live Blogging meant that a lot of interested people who couldn’t take two days away from work to attend the conference, but were very interested in the subject matter, could contribute to the discussions.
Another interesting use has been people commenting on television programmes. Over the past few months the hashtag #bbcqt has become incresingly popular with viewers of BBC 1′s Question Time. Last night, with an increased audience because of the #mpsexpenses coverage in the Daily Telegraph, comments were coming through so fast is was only possible to read a tiny fraction of them. Now, it is a commonly expressed opinion that the expanding choice of television channels and the decrease in viewing figures for the main channels has fractured the “national conversation”. Leaving aside the utopian nostalgia implicit in that comment, what we are talking about are the conversations that happened in the workplace or the playground the following day. Instead, here is a technology that allows us to comment on what we are watching in real time. Granted, much of what was passing through last night was less reasoned response and more an aggregated version of the nation screaming at the politicians on their tellies, but that isn’t always the case.
I didn’t watch Eurovision this year. But I feel as though I know more than I ever needed to after following all the #eurovision Tweets that came cascading through my Twitterstream. It appears that half the country does indeed gather friends round, get a leeetle bit tipsy and takes the mickey out of the songs and especially the costumes of the contestants. I didn’t see a single comment which indicated that the writer took the competition seriously. It made me proud.
So, hashtags are really a quick way of coalescing comments around a topic. They often happen spontaneously and quickly and they can be quite ephemeral, as Twitter Search doesn’t go back very far.
And if all that’s a become a bit too geeky for you then just try following the #facup hashtag during the final tomorrow for an example of what I’m talking about.
