#Hashtags – I think this is what I was after

I am still very much on a learning curve when it comes to Web 2.0. But when I was further down the curve and struggling for ways to track and aggregate things I wrote this post: Call Sign – Blog Sign?. The suggestion was that each blogger should have a unique-ish 'tag' and  then scan the internet (= set up RSS feeds) to aggregate everything using this tag. This way if Blogger A wanted to call his or her post to the attention of Blogger B, Blogger A would attach Blogger B's tag to the post. I still think this is neat idea.

But anyway, the #hashtags initiative by the Downtown Cartel does something similar for groups of people using Twitter. This is how it works:

1. Think of a tag – eg 'ruralnet'
2. Let everyone in the ruralnet group know you are using this tag for items that may be of interest to them
3. Get these people to 'follow' #hashtags on Twitter
4. As a 'member' of the 'ruralnet' group you can now include: #ruralnet in a Twitter item and it will pop up here: http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ together with all other Twitter items (irrespective of who posts them) containing the characters: #ruralnet

You can also take an RSS feed from http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ and pull this into your community website.

With all this in place the whole 'ruralnet' community can post interesting items to the ruralnet community website via Twitter. Cool.

See the #hashtags website for interesting ways in which this has been used to help coordinate disaster relief.