links: What the hashtag?! Following current and local events on Twitter

How it works

What the Hashtag?! keeps a running log of traffic for Twitter entries that include a hashtag. Those records are archived, and there is a Wiki-based, user-edited page which allows for categorization, connections between tags and commentary.

If you are following something new and want to catch up, the service has some number of days worth of archives, so that you can rewind the clock and pick up something you missed. It will also print out a neat transcript of traffic on a tag with time stamps to help sort through it after the fact.

Local traffic

In the course of working on this I created an Ann Arbor category, to help me track some of the local discussion which people are using hashtags to follow.

#annarbor: This tag has the most general traffic, with 20 to 40 posts on a typical day.

1:25 pm RT @WHIMichigan: The Ann Arbor Orchid Festival http://goo.gl/fb/pYWmE #community #annarbor #april2010 #festivals #annarbor

It's notable that the link (above) has all of the text of the AnnArbor.com events calendar listing for the Ann Arbor Orchid Festival, but it goes to a different site run by "Ph. Diddy Media Publishing, LLC".

#hashbash: Traffic peaked predictably on April 3, where more than 90 tweets mentioned this tag.

@AndyYpsilanti: #AnnArbor and #HashBash, you can kiss my [redacted]. I am so glad to be back in #Ypsilanti.

#aacitycouncil: Former Arbor Update editor Julie Weatherbee live-tweeted Monday's council meeting as she was watching it on television on CTN; her real time roll call of the Moravian vote was sent out as soon as it happened.

@juliewbee: Anglin, Briere, Honke, Hieftje Kunselman--no/Rapundalo, Taylor, Teall, Derezinski, Smith, Higgins--yes. Does not pass. #aacitycouncil

#tedxuofm: There's no more spots left at the TEDxUofM conference, which will be held at the University of Michigan on Saturday. Modeled after the exclusive and very interesting TED conference, the TEDxUofM event will bring a roster of speakers from the U-M campus to give talks to a 400-person audience with recorded sessions to be produced for publication online. If you didn't get an invite, tune into this tag to follow along; if you did, use it as color commentary on the event.

@ingenex Looking forward to attending #tedxuofm on Saturday! http://ow.ly/1vfU2

Disaster traffic

Because hashtags were born in the disaster of a San Diego fire, many organizations have successfully used them for crisis communications. One leader in this effort is National Public Radio's Andy Carvin, who has been instrumental in the work to organize crisis camps to coordinate international response to disasters that cause wide impact, mess up communications in the affected area, and create lots of uncertainty about what is actually going on.

Southeastern Michigan is usually immune from the direct impact of hurricanes and tsunami, but as the extreme weather of earlier this week showed, it's still in need of work in figuring out where fast-moving tornadoes are and what damage they are doing.

The #tornado tag gets used both by people who are going through tornado conditions and by several automated weather services which broadcast or rebroadcast tornado notifications and damage reports. One recent example shows the structure of one automated message:

@tornadochasers #weather SPC MD 289: MD 0289 CONCERNING SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH 63...64... FOR SWRN OH/CENTRAL KY/MIDDLE... http://bit.ly/9C9Z79 #tornado

which is mixed in the stream with this post from yesterday:

@JoelLesher I hear the #tornado siren. Has a tornado touched down in #Indy?

Advice for using hashtags

Hashtags are just ugly enough that you don't #want #to #put #them #in #front #of #every #word. Be selective in the use of them, knowing that there's a tradeoff between efficiency by machine processing and readability by humans.

Whenever possible, follow someone else's lead in using a tag rather than making one up yourself. You're trying to either glom on to an existing community or create one around the event, and the more people who are already tuned in to the use of that word the better. As a start, for instance, you might have more impact with #tornado rather than #a2tornado for a mythical upcoming Ann Arbor tornado, just because the latter is rare enough that no one will have used it before and thus no one is tuned in.

If you're organizing an event, pick a tag in advance and stick to it. Whenever possible, make it line up with some other use of the same words that you have in other media, so that someone might guess it. Corral your coordinating committee to all have them use it enough ahead of time that it gets some use before the time you need it.

For more information on What the Hashtag, follow its developer's weblog. The site is a product of Microblink, a small tech startup based in Des Moines, Iowa led by Rob Jensen and Mike Templeton, with additional contributions from lead developer Mark Bockenstedt.

Edward Vielmetti organizes the weekly a2b3 lunch in Ann Arbor on Thursdays. Follow him on Twitter as @vielmetti.