So I’ve recently started finding out a bit about this whole hashtagging thing. No idea what that is? That’s ok, neither did I. This entry is all about what I have learnt about hashtagging.
Basically, in short it is a user-led tagging practice for micro-blogging platforms which currently don’t include native tagging functionality. All the micro-blogging platforms (I am aware of anyway) do not include the ability to add tags to posts and other forms of online content like blogs and wikis do. Although I am very interested in what the emergence of the hashtagging phenomenon means for social networking and user-led innovation (I’ll post about this aspect of hashtagging separately), this post is a more practical look at what hashtagging is and how it works.
A short history of hashtags
I can’t seem to find any “official” history of the socio-digital phenomenon’s origin, but what I did dig up was that well-known open source advocate Chris Messina seems to have been the first to recommend a user-led tagging practice. On 24 August 2007 he posted on his Twitter account recommending the hash symbol as a prefix included inline to indicate a tag:
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]
The next evening he posted a detailed proposal of his idea and how it might work on his blog FactoryCity. In the entry he talks about where this kind of discussion had come from, namely around the desire for groups on Twitter (the exact form, structure and management of which was in contention). His interest in creating something that simply provides a “better eavesdropping experience on Twitter” led him to a focus more on “…contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity within the Twittosphere” (emphasis removed) than with joining, being invited to and managing groups on the platform:
…[G]roups imply a kind of management. Whether you’re dealing with public groups that you create, join and then promote or contact groups that you ultimately must manage like any kind of mailing list, they imply an order of magnitude of work that would ultimately work against the adoption of the whole grouping premise and thereby minimize any benefits to a select group of hyper-dedicated process-followers.
What he actually proposes is a way to tag common content; a way for multiple users talking about the same or similar things to commonly identify that material as being related to each other. And more importantly, that the relationship that has been formed between these various tweets is not closed to members of the group only. He calls them channels (cast your mind back to IRC kids), but unlike other sites with channels, the beauty of the hashtag is that it doesn’t even matter what platform it is on!
So why the # symbol?
The short answer, the # symbol works with the Twitter platform no matter how it is inputted. It doesn’t matter if you include it in your tweet in the entry field at www.twitter.com, include it in the entry field in a third-party application that posts to Twitter or input it by SMS from a mobile device. It all publishes, it all becomes inter-related.
But there again, it doesn’t really matter what the symbol prefix is. It is about how it is used. Because Messina is an “open everything” kinda guy, he values things being as ‘open’ as they can be. He expresses reluctance to the introduction of in-platform groups functionality. He criticises the utility of Pownce’s Friends Sets functionality because it “requires use of their website to take advantage of this feature”. Metadata should be technologically neutral.
He has been involved in efforts to encourage a normative nomenclature and syntax to content online. Hashtagging is literally nothing more than a text character inputed before a single word ‘tag’ by the user. Messina also anticipated a sort of natural selection of tagging, where hashtags emerge from the “wild of tags” depending on popularity and practicality:
I also like that the folksonomic approach (as in, there are no “pre-established groups”) allows for a great deal of expression, of negotiation (I imagine that #barcamp will be a common tag between events, but that’s fine, since if there is a collision, say between two separate BarCamps on the same day, they’ll just have to socially engineer a solution and probably pick a new tag, like #barcampblock) and of decay (that is, over time, as tags are used less frequently, other people can reuse them — no domain squatting!). It also enforces actual use in the wild of tags, since no evidence of a tag will exist without it first being used in conversation.
hashtags.org
UPDATE 24 December 2007: In December 2007 Cody Marx Bailey and Aaron Farnham from Downtown Cartel created a service called hashtags.org that aggregates hashtags from Twitter and makes them searchable. The service also charts usage/frequency trends of tags. For each tag indexed the site generates a URL (http://hashtags.org/tag/hashtag where ‘hashtag’ is the tag you are looking for). It also provides an RSS feed for the search results.
Hashtagging becomes a socio-digital norm
Although there was some initial resistance, it seems to have taken off since then.
Back when he was proposing it, Messina predicted the main reasons why it would become a norm in micro-blogging. To paraphrase:
- It requires no management, people opt in to a specific hash “channel” by prefixing a #;
- It is very easy to do, you simply add # before the word you want to tag;
- It requires no technological aggregation;
- It is folksonomic, integrating simply and easily into existing Twitter syntax and behaviour, rather than introducing new ways of doing things; and
- It alleviates the attribution stacking problem (ie if you are talking to a group of 5 using the replies functionality you need to include @username five times before you’ve contributed to the conversation which takes us a significant number of characters out of your 140 total).
Interestingly, the prediction of Messina that didn’t happen was the ability the establishment of channels as discrete ’spaces’ on www.twitter.com. They don’t have discrete URLs (although hashtag.org does create discrete URLs for tags), nor are users able to join and leave channels. The way that hashtags play out now is that users can ‘follow’ a channel without necessarily ‘joining’ it or being actively involved in it; but I actually feel this better facilitates Messina’s “eavesdropping experience” that the former proposal.
UPDATE 15 July 2008: Twitter acquired a startup service called Summize that searched Twitter posts using the Twitter XMPP stream. With the Summize engineers now part of Twitter, they set out to create Twitter Search, a search service at the subdomain search.twitter.com. Although hashtags displayed on twitter.com are not linked to a search query of that term at search.twitter.com, in-coming links from third-party applications like Twhirl now point to search.twitter.com not hashtags.org.
UPDATE 18 February 2009: Twitter are planning to better integrate their new search capabilities into twitter.com.
A hashtag ‘how to’ guide
Use this guide to help you hashtag. Because this post has gotten very long I have moved the ‘how to’ guide. It is available as its own post here.
Want more?
See Chris Messina’s original proposal for Twitter Tag Channels, hashtags.org and ‘Hashtags‘ on the Public Wiki for Twitter. If you are interested in finding out how to hashtag see my ‘how to’ guide on hashtagging.
3 Trackbacks