hashtags

‘If you like’ #followfriday

Posted on by Kevin Sablan

Twitter’s #followfriday is a great way to recommend users that your friends should follow. The idea is that your friends trust you to only link to people who tweet about things they care about.

But your followers are probably a fairly diverse crowd. People who share your professional interests probably follow you. Some people who are into some of your hobbies might follow you. And some of your friends “in real life” probably follow your tweets.

How could you possibly recommend someone one person who would appeal to each of those diverse crowds?

So I propose that we qualify each #followfriday tweet by telling people why they should follow that person. For example: 

If you like one-liners, #followfriday @forces2.

If you want to learn more about #followfriday:

As always, please share your #followfriday tips in the comments below. Don’t forget to share links.

100 popular words from #collegejourn and #editorchat

Posted on by Kevin Sablan

Every Wednesday night, a group of  “professional writers and editors who use the micro-blogging service Twitter ” use the #editorchat hashtag to gather and “discuss how best to help one another.” (Thank you @LydiaBreakfast and @milehighfool.) Here, courtesy of Wordle, are the 50 non-common words that they used most frequently when they met on February 11.

Editorchat wordle

Every Sunday, “a weekly chat about college journalism” takes place in Meebo Rooms. (Thank you @suzanneyada.) It started on Twitter, where participants used the #collegejourn hashtag to talk to each other.  Here are the 50 most frequently used non-common words that were mentioned during their February 15 conversation.

Collegejourn wordle

I would be remiss to not mention @PRsarahevans‘ Monday night #journchat where “journalists,  bloggers and PR folks” converse. Unfortunately, their conversations contain thousands of tweets, more than I can crunch for this quick post.

To find out how to participate in Twitter chats, or to start a group, take a look at these posts:

Do you have any other tips or tools for Twitter chats? Don’t keep them to yourself, share in the comments below.

If you like this post, you tweet it now.

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    CNN makes top #inaug09 links on Digg and Twitter

    Posted on by Kevin Sablan

    A quick look at links mentioned during Inauguration Day shows that CNN was the only site that was shared frequently by both Diggers and Twitterers.

    Right before midnight, I looked at the most popular links for the past 24 hours on Digg and extracted the top five links related to the inauguration. Then I did the same for Twitturly and Twitturls, two sites that track links mentioned on Twitter. Here are the results.

    Digg (top in 24 hours)

    1. Barack Obama Officialy Becomes 44th American President, CNN (21,870 diggs)
    2. Whitehouse.gov – before and after, Flickr (4,708 diggs)
    3. Presidential Gatling Gun-Equipped Suburban, Jalopnik (2,863 diggs)
    4. What Did You Think? Text Of Barack Obama’s Speech, Chicago Tribune (2,619 diggs)
    5. CNN: Roberts ‘screwed up’ oath of office, The Raw Story (2,547)

    Twitturly (last 24 hours)

    1. CNN.com Live – Facebook (204 active tweets)
    2. Barack Obama Inauguration Day, Ustream.TV (108 active tweets)
    3. Inaugural preparations, Boston.com (90 active tweets)
    4. Presidential Gatling Gun-Equipped Suburban, Jalopnik (63 active tweets)
    5. Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, EOP (52 active tweets)

    Twitturls “today”

    1. Welcome to the White House, whitehouse.gov
    2. The 44th President – The Moment and Satellite image of crowds on the Mall, CNN.com
    3. The country’s new robots.txt file, Kottke.org
    4. Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to … , ReadWriteWeb
    5. Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, EOP

    For more about the popularity of inauguration links, make sure to see my list of popular inauguration pages bookmarked on Delicious on the day of the event.

    Why use #inaug09, or any other hashtag?

    Posted on by Kevin Sablan

    If you are a Twitter newbie trying to experience Inauguration Day within the microblogosphere, you’re probably wondering why so many tweets are littered with #inaug09 and #inauguration.

    The answer is simple: Hashtags (words preceded by the the hash symbol) are turned into links by many programs and sites used to follow and read tweets.

    For example, if a chunk of that first paragraph was a tweet, many Twitter users would see it this way:

    ksablan you’re probably wondering why so many tweets are littered with #inaug09 and #inauguration

    Here are a couple of tools to help you to follow the #inaug09 hashtag and to add that tag to your tweets as you micropost away.

    • Tweet Grid has a 2009 Inauguration Live Tweets page where you can watch three streams of inauguration tweets. You can post a  tweet from the page, and the “#inaug09” hashtag will automatically be added to your message.
    • Tweetchat will also add a hashtag to your tweets before posting. Tweetchat treats hashtags as “roooms.” Go to the inaug09 room (hashtag is optional on this site) to join the conversation.
    • Twibble Mobile lets you create “templates” to store strings of text, like “#inaug09,” that you can quickly insert while tweeting from your mobile device.

    After our new president is sworn in, you might wonder how you can start your own hashtag. I suggest reading Amy Gahran’s How to start a Twitter hashtag blog post.

    And if you’re wondering how the #inaug09 hashtag was created, here is …

    The birth of a hashtag

    On the morning of Decemeber 3, 2008, this message was tweeted by @acarvin:

    Tweet from @acarvin

    Which led to this conversation:

    That was all!

    On the last day of the year, an NPR blog post by Andy Carvin urged people to include the #inaug09 and #dctrip09 tags whenever using social tools to post content related to the inauguration. That blog post was followed by a requisite tweet, of course. And the rest is becoming history.

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