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:
- Think of a tag - eg 'ruralnet'
- Let everyone in the ruralnet group know you are using this tag for items that may be of interest to them
- Get these people to 'follow' #hashtags on Twitter
- 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.
Thanks for this Simon. I've let this pass me by, but your post has piqued my interest.
See... we're all on that learning curve :)
Posted by: Steve Bridger | April 15, 2008 at 12:00 AM