Hashtags

Angus Strachan

Probably the best know type of tagging in the world to date is the hash-tag, and the most well known platform for using the hash-tag is Twitter. Twitter is “a fast growing social Web application allowing its users to publish and communicate with very short messages” also known as a micro-blog (Poschko 2011). At the beginning of 2010, Twitter had 100 million users registers, this number composed over 65 million tweets per day (Poschko 2011)! With such massive amounts of information being uploaded each day to the ‘twittersphere’ the system of hashtags helps the user sort through it all. This form of tagging has even made it to professional use in the media; it is now not uncommon to have talk shows and the like have tweets from their viewers pop-up on screen. This can bee seen in figure 1, a screen shot of ABC’s QandA:

Screen Shot 2014-10-23 at 12.25.30 pm

Source: Q&A – abc.net.au

Angus Strachan

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon hosts a segment called hashtags. Jimmy Fallon goes onto twitter and starts a hashtag in order to receive humorous stories from other users on twitter, all you need to do to send it to him is write your story and follow it up with the hashtag that Jimmy Fallon creates. From there Jimmy Fallon can then search through all the stories with ease thanks to the tagging system. To show you how big this community is, listen to the introduction of the segment – “within 20 minutes it was a world-wide trending topic”.