The latest from the Meta Hashtag World

For context, you may want to read some previous posts of mine before you read this one.

• From Bob Eubanks to Wikiland (January 8, 2008)


• Warring Review Strategies, Part Two - How Many Birds Can You Kill With a Single Stone? (January 6, 2008)


• Warring Review Strategies, Part One - Can't We All Just Get Along? (January 6, 2008)


• Hashtagging Challenges When Events Occur at Different Times in Different Locations (January 1, 2008)


• The end of hashtags - it isn't a hash (December 19, 2007)


• The Year Fades, But Hashtags Remain (December 1, 2007)


• More on Hashtags (October 23, 2007)

Yesterday, Stowe Boyd posted a follow-up message to his previous message about the "hashstar" hashtag. This new post collected the comments and thoughts of a number of people, including myself (my successful experiment with using @twitcrit and #* simultaneously, and its greater ramifications in the standards world).

The most intriguing feedback came from Mahesh CR. Here's part of his comment:

Like your idea of #* for all reviews. Extending this idea can give us a whole little one letter taxonomy!

#$ - Finance
#? - question. will make hoosgot.com irrelevant
etc..

And here is what Mahesh CR said about meta hashtags in his own blog:

But it does seem a little weird to have metadata(atleast 1 char) within 140chars worth of text. And possibly more if the tag does not appear naturally within text.

Although this didn't specifically address the #$ #? etc. idea, it is germane to it in a couple of ways. In the model that is being proposed, the meta hashtags will not "appear naturally within text"; instead, they'll serve as pointers within the text that indicate the type of material contained in the tweet. My usual format is "@twitcrit #* bla bla bla," which is dictated by the fact that @twitcrit HAS to be the first item in the tweet, and because it makes sense to put hashstar right after @twitcrit and before the body of the text.

In an item that was posted today, Mahesh CR went into greater detail about the idea that was shared with Stowe Boyd. Now, several meta hashtags are proposed:

#* All reviews
#$ Finance related content
#? A question
#! Alerts
#+ Reminds of redcross, hence any humanitarian stuff
#^ Any geographic stuff(or fashion?)
#& Relationships
#, Continued from previous twitter message
#= Adult!

There are some interesting ideas floating around here. I'll try a few of them out.

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