VirtualPresence: Hashing up some more Twitter

Last week's post on Twitter was on basic Twitter usage. Today, we'll see another aspect of Twitter that you are bound to run into when you start using the service.

As it happens, people on Twitter often post messages on the same topic. They might, for instance, reveal their thoughts on an upcoming event (like elections, etc.). These messages only go as far as the circle of people they are followed by. In order to find these kinds of messages, the #-character was introduced as a convention. For example, if you are going to put a message up on the upcoming American presidential elections, the you can include the word "#election" in your message. And this makes it easy to find those kinds of message. Just head over to the Twitter search page, enter "#election" as a search term, and voila, all recent messages about the elections show up (well, at least the ones that also had "#election" inside the message).

These #-tags are not imposed by a certain company or institution. Anyone can start using a new one. The hard part is getting others to use it as well...

What about my band?

So what do you need to do with #-tags for your band? I wouldn't bother with them too much. Keep an eye out for those that are actively used and that you can use. Maybe a festival that you will be playing at has its own #-tag... If you find any of these, don't hesitate to try them out, but otherwise, there's going to be more useful things to do instead of doing this kind of semantic tagging.

Do you have a question about using webapps for your band? Drop me an email, and I might answer it on the blog.