Ulearn2Twitter

Hashtags in Action

AJ — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 05:43:54 +0000

My friend, Cristie, sent me an article link about the Twitter traffic surrounding the Kimmel Center lockin at NYU. I thought it an interesting enough event to discuss hashtags.

Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. We provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

I don’t know the back-story but there is a protest at the Kimmel Center at New York University. I found this article, but little else: http://www.uwire.com/Article.aspx?id=3781604

The original article about the number of tweets has a graph showing how much traffic on Twitter is about this event. On Twitter you can use hashtag notation (#) to “tag” your tweet. That’s how they know how much Twitter traffic is discussing this event. You’ll see more stories referencing this phenomenon in the future.

Using the hashtag notation notifies other people who might be interested in the event to see your tweet even if not following you. It also allows you to see people who are tweeting about the event even if you aren’t following them. It’s a good way to catch a breaking news story and, really, to watch a story break before the MSM (mainstream media) even knows it’s happening.

For example, people who were tweeting about this event might have sent a tweet saying

“Topless girls protesting — nice racks! Get here fast, the police are moving in. #TBNYU”

and if you look on the hashtag site: http://hashtags.org/

and search for TBNYU, you get to: http://hashtags.org/tag/TBNYU,

where you find what other people who were tweeting about the event had to say.

This is useful for major news events such as the SoCal fires and elections and such. When you see someone use a hashtag, you can go to the site and see what is up, see what people are saying.

Aftermath of NYU lockin.

Pardon the Mess — Site Under Renovation

AJ — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:08:16 +0000

Maybe you’ve heard of blogger.com. It’s a place where a person can create a blog (for free), spend hours and hours and hours working on the blog to create the ultimate teaching tool for a class that will be taught to her community college colleagues in January 2009, and at the beginning of December 2008 be blocked from her blog (her drafts, posts, and numerous links) by a spambot that has decided for some unclarified reason that her blog is spam. In spite of numerous attempts to get access to the blog articles to move them to another free blog publishing site (such as, oh, I don’t know, WordPress.com), she is not able to access her articles and must piece together published articles that she had not yet read on her Bloglines.com account and rewrite those that were not yet published. All of the hours and hours and hours of work spent on the first blog were 25% salvaged, thanks to Bloglines.com, and 75% flushed down the toilet.

I have, 2 months later and 1 month too late for the class, finally gotten access to my material. The easiest way to salvage it before the blog gets spambotted again was to publish all drafts and import the articles into this blog. So, things are a bit messy and confusing until I get the reconstruction done and the tools and materials all cleaned up. And, before I go to bed tonight, I will back up this blog with the handy-dandy backup tool that WordPress.com provides users because WordPress.com rocks!

Twitter « // Internet Duct Tape

AJ — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:36:00 +0000

http://internetducttape.com/tag/twitter/

Sent from my iPhone

Twitter Bullies

AJ — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 04:47:00 +0000

Twitter bullies don’t get a cute Twitter name like “twullies” because their behavior isn’t really cute, it’s boring.

How will you know a bully when you see one? Quite likely, you won’t recognize the behavior until it is too late and aimed at you. My experience was with a male bully but there are certainly plenty of female bullies out there. It starts out with a disagreement or a misunderstanding and ends in name-calling, just like in preschool.

What can you do? Well, the first step is to stop following the person. The second step is to block them. I recommend doing both steps immediately after the first aggressive or rude behavior. The bully gets a thrill out of being rude and mean-spirited to people who seem to be following him so that he can be rude and mean to them. If you don’t get a thrill out of this relationship, get out of it immediately.