If you are familiar with Twitter, than you have seen a hashtag before. If not, a hashtag is “a combination of the pound symbol (#) followed by a keyword, generally associated with whatever topic is being tracked” (via Microblink). Essentially, hashtags are a great way to track discussion about specific topics. But there is a problem with these – half the time you see them and have no idea what they mean. #FOWA = Future of Web Apps.. If you aren’t in tune with that conference you’d see thousands of people using it and have no idea what they are talking about.
In steps What the Hashtag?! – a new service from Microblink announced today that aims to help track the origin and meaning of these seemingly random hashtags. So what is this new service? It’s a “user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter” – using the popular open source wiki solution MediaWiki.
It works by finding finding trends on Twitter and generating the page. Hashtags can also be added by anyone who has created an account. So far there have been 480 hashtags indexed in the first seven days of operation. Microblink has also created a number of tools to interact with the service – including a Twitter bot that accepts direct messages, a Greasemonkey script, and a Search Engine plugin for Firefox.
Read the Microblink Announcement
Check out What The Hashtag?!
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Thank you for the post. Friday was an amazing day and we are excited for our new project. Lots of work still do but the response on Twitter has been great.
Rob Jensen’s last blog post..What The Hashtag?!, an Encyclopedia for Twitter Hashtags