#HashTagging

Hash tagging has become a key part of digital journalism and social networking sites. It all started back in 2003 by a social bookmarking site called Delicious as a way to help users categorize and find their bookmarks later. Flickr also began to use this concept in tagging pictures to make them more searchable and show ones that are relevant to a specific subject. What the hashtag is, is a pound symbol (#) before a word that links it to everything else that has been tagged with the same word. For example, tagging #digitaljournalism on a post would link it to everything else that has been has tagged with #digitaljournalism. Twitter is probably the key influential source that has created the widespread use of hash tagging we see on the internet today. With a 140 character limit, users post their "tweet" and can include multiple hashtags that (when we click it) will send us to all the other tweets that include the same hashtag. Twitter also has a feature that shows national trending topics, today one of them is #2ChainzJailLyrics, clicking on this hashtag brings us to this:

#LG hashtag on a Facebook post

Now the majority of online news sites, blogging sites, and social networking sites in general let us use the hashtag. Facebook has yet to adopt the concept, but many times I have seen people hashtag a word in their post- although it looks the same it doesn't link us to anything, which is the whole idea behind hash tagging... this brings us to the case of the confused hash tagger. Another common occurrence I have seen is the #every #word #has #a #hashtag on twitter, #OrTheyHaveAWholeSentenceHashtagged. Although the concept has gone over some people's heads, it has become a very helpful online tool that is very likely to stay around.