Hashtag Research

This is just gonna be a list of links to organize my hashtag research:

• Article on the origin of hashtags. Although this blog post seems to really be laying out the ground work for hashtags. — Apparently this is the guy who first proposed them!
• Very interesting article on the evolution and use of hashtags.
• Fun website that allows hashtag searching, you can see trends, and they have graphs!
• I found this wiki useful and full of good reading suggestions.
• A post about one of the early successes in using hashtags, something that demonstrated their use.

From my reading, this is how I understand the evolution of hashtags. They were first suggested as a means to aggregate tweets on certain topics or about certain things: thus, their initial use was to facilitate searching. As they became more popular, they evolved as a way to add humour or context to your tweet.

This is very interesting, since this is exactly what metadata is all about (at least in terms of facilitating searching and grouping of similarly themed information objects). However, where they are significantly differ is in terms of the social aspects. And the social aspects are not simply like tags or other types of folksonomy (which all seem to be just about searching), rather they also facilitate real time creation of information objects within a body of discourse. Very interesting. Particularly for their use in political organizing and protests.