Hash Tags 'n' Glad Rags

Listening to the Six Pixels of Separation podcast on my shiny new iPod Touch last night, I was struck by an item which highlighted the growing use of hash tags. In this case it was referring to an educational conference held in Berlin: #OEB08. Following the eye-witness reports of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on Twitter a week or so ago, I do recall seeing this reference to #mumbai but gave it no thought at the time.
I digress here for a moment or two. My flow has been interrupted while I actually search for the aforementioned key. It’s not displayed on the Apple keyboard. A quick search on the web not only reveals the location of # (alt+3 for uk keyboards) but also that many others have struggled to find it before.
It turns out (and remember, I know there’s huge numbers of you technical folk out there who are saying right now ‘Doh! You don’t know that yet?’ I’m talking to the rest of us) that the # key before a search term actually does a job.
This is how the site http://hashtags.org explains it: “Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.”
Hmm. Not sure I quite get that. Bit of real-time research needed here. Been to Wikipedia. A bit clearer, but maths never was my strong point. A few more websites later, it seems that, probably stated too simply, the hash tag improves searchability on a database. So if someone tweets using # followed by a term, eg Stephen Fry’s #oscarwildeday, and then someone uses the same term in their tweets, any searches will find all those entries quckly and easily. Another report I found about the use of hash tags was by anti-bullying site BullyingUK.
And of course, for every idea or innovation, there’s always people who see the negatives. As It happens, I think Paul Nich makes a good point here in his explanation that hash keys only work well when the group is big. He suggests another solution for smaller groups or organisations.
So, I’ll be trying a few # searches over coming days and I’ll let you know how I get on.

Social Networking for the Rest Of Us

In terms of the internet, 2008 has been an important year for ickledot. In addition to stepping out and forming this little company, earning a bit of money and meeting some wonderful people, I have also come to recognise the benefits of what has become known as Web 2.0. I realise this is around half a decade after the movers and shakers turned the internet from a passive ‘get a website and wait for others to come and visit’ to a more interactive world of blogging, Twitter, Facebook et al. From what I read, they are already moving on to version 3.
I have described how this happened for me before but briefly it began in a big way with a presentation by Ian Green of Green Communications, my reading of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and following the blogs of influential voices such as Dave Winer, Mitch Joel and others.
Obviously here in Sunny Oxenhope we are a world away from such high fliers (although the internet allows us to be an email away from direct contact and generally if we have something interesting to contribute a reply ensues). What interests me is how this technology can help local businesses - the butcher, greengrocer, hairdresser. How could they become part of the global network and also see their customer base and sales increase? Certainly many such institutions are under constant threat from the big supermarkets and need all the help they can get. Following on from that, is there potential for a local social networking business? If the big corporations can be served by companies such as Green Communications, could local shops and businesses benefit from similar yet smaller scale advice, particularly when sites such as Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, UpComing or even LinkedIn mean a considerable web presence can be constructed with very little expenditure?
To compare my position with a race or journey, I look way ahead to the leaders, the front runners including the individuals and organisations mentioned above. Looking back though, there is a long tail of social networking stragglers. My excellent local butcher had never heard of Twitter when I mentioned how my tweets about his pies had got a number of responses. He might argue he’s doing very nicely thank you and doesn’t need to get involved in all that stuff. At the very least though it is self-publicity and free advertising. The potential beyond is huge. Just ahead in the race are those who have websites in the same way they have business cards, compliments slips or letterheads. Their sites exist and and are immediately forgotten. Six months later they look tired, neglected and hardly ever visited. I have even come across larger institutions such as museums that still look upon their websites as little more than virtual billboards.
So that’s one of my target for the coming year. To explore how the wonderful world of social networking can be applied successfully to local shops and businesses that are ‘under the radar’ of the big players. Watch this space.