Q&A | Angus' blog

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:

Source: Q&A – abc.net.au

So, have folksonomies changed the way that we interact with each other? Yes, most definitely, it is such a big change that the inclusion of folksonomies can create a whole new community, one without restrictions of country boarders. Like we’ve seen on twitter, tagging is now a worldwide phenomenon and ideas are able to move freely from one place to another, like we’ve seen in Jimmy Fallons Hashtag segment on the tonight show. In fact the use of twitter and hashtags are so wide spread that a multitude of talk shows and opinion driven discussion shows have a live twitter feed on the screen so that the person watching the show from home can also have their say, like the example of QandA. And as the technology grows so too will the use of tagging in order to bring about new concepts such as those in my potential future career.