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.

Tags: hash tags, six pixels of separation, stephen fry, wikipedia, Oscar Wilde