Hashtags have the added benefit that they won't show up for others if they're not used.

If you look at which hashtags are being used (trending), you get a taxonomy of micro-contexts, ranked by popularity, with which you can navigate Twitter. All from the bottom up.

The folksonomic approach (user-generated tagging) is beneficial because it allows complexity to emerge bottom-up.

Twitter's hashtags form a dual purpose. They label a status with a certain tag, telling us something about the intended context of that Tweet.

The ease of which makes it frictionless for anyone to jump into the conversation.

But they also equip an interested eavesdropper with the ability to follow along with a conversation. This idea (at the time this was being discussed at Twitter) was already happening with Flickr and Delicious tags.

The idea of:

When you use a hastag and the channel with that name doesn't exist, it gets created, is an idea that came from IRC.

The requirements [[Joe Messina]] laid out for a concept of "channels" on Twitter was that:

1. It shouldn't add any friction to his current use
2. It shouldn't require any web-based management to make the most of

Twitter of 2020 satisfies these requirements. You just type #something, and you can click on that hash or search for it to see results.

[[Joe Messina]] details an example from [[Jaiku]] where you can create a channel by simply posting a message that starts with a hash (#). If the channel doesn't exist, it will be created for you.

[[Joe Messina]]'s reason for suggesting the hashtag was his interest in having "better eavesdropping experience on Twitter"

Bhattacharya, C., Chowdhury, D., Ahmed, N., Ozgur, S., Bhattacharya, B., Mridha, S. K., & Bhattacharyya, M. (2020). The Nature, Cause and Consequence of COVID-19 Panic among Social Media Users in India. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dgr45

This is a really good point - the reasons people use hashtags can be different for different topics. Whereas the example of wikileaks may have been a more diffuse and ad hoc conversation, it makes sense that people would use health related hashtags in a more community based way. It is the difference between tweeting about a current event versus tweeting about an ongoing topic. Definitely a good reason to study this more.

Yes - the weekly chat usage of Twitter is a perfect example of how people use defined and well-known hashtags to create and participate in CoPs

some annotation

So this forking is something I've long not grasped from this wiki revival (and the whole git movement). What if the need for consensus has less to do with the need for singular, encyclopedic voice than simply a single page. That is, it's a UI problem more than a content problem.

Perhaps I need to spend more time in GitHub et al., but generally I don't want to read a bunch of separate takes on a thing. For me, the window of time in which a hashtag is useful for knowledge gathering is quite short. I feel like I would get lost among the forks.

Part of the reason that I like annotation is that the "fork" of the original content is not too distant and still very much attached to a single page. To me that trail seems cleaner and clearer than duplicating content and starting a new path...

Neat use of TAGS Explorer. Did do so, to interesting effects. Regular livetweet events may be more interesting. And there’s something to be said about NodeXL and COSMOS.