Comments on: SXSW: When Hashtags Go Wild

By: Oscar

Oscar — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:50:55 +0000

People are using tags now in other ways, like just to give additional content to a tweet. In some cases I’m starting to find out maybe it isn’t so bad to have a long hashtag, sometimes they’re funny. Also see what I wrote about it on my blog. “hash-tagging it up…”

By: Matt Keough

Matt Keough — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:54:29 +0000

What we need is a hashtag shortening service

By: MMX

MMX — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:37:22 +0000

I notice allot of businesses just don’t know what hash tags are, what they do, and the value of using hash tags to identify sessions. I agree that hash tags are best when used in under 7 characters. However, preferably under 5 characters.

Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been allot of talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology in its indexing process. Matt Cutts recently clarified this in a video with WPN.

By: Gilbert Midonnet

Gilbert Midonnet — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:41:08 +0000

You’ve definately turned into the Jakob Nielsen of SEOs.

It was an excellent post. Too many conferences use these long hashtags.

By: Pat Strader

Pat Strader — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:29:21 +0000

Great points, I think alot of folks were a bit surprised by the length of the session tags. I know alot of folks around me chuckled when you commented in the algorithm session, “and after that, you might have some room to tweet”.

I had pitched for a session on making events social, based on work from some festival projects. I think a great opportunity for someone like yourself to pitch a similar session as it relates to events. With the proliferation of “un-conferences” I think there would be some value there.

By: Phil Bradley

Phil Bradley — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:33:30 +0000

Hi Oscar – I think the answer to your question is ‘possibly all of them’. If I was a conference organiser, I’d be taking responsibility for it. If I wasn’t, and wanted copies, again, it’s down to me. I think it’s just another of the housekeeping duties for individuals and companies.

By: Oscar

Oscar — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:21:49 +0000

Hi Phil, sure I understand what you mean and I guess I do agree with you. The question is though, who would archive the tweets. One’s self? the event organizer? twitter? archive.org? But you pretty much nailed it with the last 7 words of your comment.

By: Phil Bradley

Phil Bradley — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:04:34 +0000

Oscar – what you do in that case is archive the tweets themselves so that you have them for the future, perhaps making a word cloud out of them. If you do need a date, (and like Danny I’m not convinced that you do), it shouldn’t be necessary to have any more than the last figure, so anything this year would have a hashtag that ends in 0, next year ends in 1, and so on. By the time there’s going to be any confusion a decade will have gone past and we’ll all be doing something different by then anyway.

By: Oscar

Oscar — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:35:43 +0000

I agree with you partially but not on the re-using the hashtags part, unless you’ve exahusted your options. It would be nice to know that a given tag not only represents a subset of people & a topic, but also a snapshot in time, in history per se of what was being talked about. So at times, I think its good to have the 2010 part.

In relationship to the lenght of the tag, I think 5 – 7 characters should be enough, so it doesn’t interfere with the main content, if you can call ~120 characters “content.”

By: Phil Bradley

Phil Bradley — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:25:19 +0000

You are of course right. What’s interesting though, is why people do come up with absurdly long tags, and it’s because they don’t understand the basic principle behind it. People will use tags because they think it’s some sort of classification scheme – particularly with library/info science conferences. This is why they add dates as well, which leads to the second point of misunderstanding – they don’t understand Twitter. Which also means that they don’t really get real time content and real time search. They’re still living in an old paradigm, where content needs to be badged, defined, catalogued and classified. As long as everyone can agree on the tag, what it actually *is* doesn’t really matter.

That’s really the issue that needs to be addressed; the basic lack of understanding. If you can do that (and it’s a big ‘if’) then the hashtag problem falls away pretty quickly.