What The Hashtag?
By Anna Johnson on July 8th, 2009What The Hashtag is a new service that aims to be a kind of repository of definitions and information about hashtags.
‘Hashtags’ are words preceded by the hash (or pound) symbol # which are used on online communities such as Twitter to add context and metadata to people’s conversations.
The idea of assigning a hashtag to a tweet, for example, is to group that tweet with related tweets, so your tweet may be more easily found when someone searches on that hashtag.
It’s fairly common, for example, to refer to an event with ‘#name-of-event’ which, in turn, allows people to find what everyone is saying in relation to that event.
What The Hashtag aims to track hashtags, provide a definition for each one (so people know what the hashtag is referring to) and also provide other interesting information such as hashtag usage statistics, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, charts, related hashtags and external links.
