Hashtags are a tool I never really saw the power of, or point in using, until yesterday. At SXSW an interesting panel was “New Think for Old Publishers” featuring Clay Shirky, Deb Schultz, and a few other notables from Penguin Publishing.
The panel kicked off by establishing the “#sxswbp” hashtag with the idea that people at the panel and on the web at large could have an electronic text-based conversation around the physical, spoken conversation happening.
As defined “hashtags are a convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. You create a hashtag by prefixing a word with a hash symbol “#”. Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels.”
After what seemed like 30-minutes of throat-clearing, resume bullet point listing, and a just few brilliant nuggets from Clay Shirky, the audience started to revolt. This was supposed to be a conversation about new thinking in publishing, and the panelists were not fulfilling that promise. Great writeup of that over at MediaLoper.
Inmates takeover the asylum
The takeaway for me was that the revolt was broadcast, indexed, and amplified over at this hashtag thread on Twitter. This presents an interesting case for curating and editing trending topics on twitter. What I mean is that one could can and should use algorithms to scrape the conversation with the output being eye candy (charts, tag-clouds etc), but I think there’s an opportunity to add a layer of intelligence and production on top of these streams in a more packaged way.