Natiiv

#Battle to #Stop #Hashtaggery: Defeat

Tagged hashtags , socialmedia , twitter

After nearly two years of railing against the use of hashtags, Leah finally admits defeat.

Explained in less than 140 characters: What’s #irritating about #this sentence?

It kind of looks like a representation of someone with food in their mouth while they talk.

Dave Coustan, aka Extraface

Since Dave Coustan published his epic post Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter, I've pointed it to people when they want to understand why I didn't like hashtags on Twitter. I have often been the lone person in a room not using the assigned hashtag. The one called out and apologized to in front of full audiences as the hashtag for the event was announced.

For the uninitiated, hashtags are pound signs placed in front of words in a tweet. The idea is that it signifies the following word as meta-data to the tweet. People attending then add the hashtag and could aggregate the tweets to see what other people were saying.

I don't like the way hashtags look. I find them aesthetically jarring. Hashtags interrupt the flow of the sentence for me and historically hashtags did not make the tweet more searchable. But over the last year, especially since SXSW 2009, the use of hashtags has exploded and it became harder and harder to be the dissenting voice.

Then it happened. Within the last month, Twitter has made a hashtag link directly to search. Twitter has given the hashtag native functionality within the site, much like it added links to @usernames about two years ago. I can no longer do battle against the use of hashtags. I still don't like them, I still find them jarring, but now they add a direct link to search and that is valuable to me.

I would like to go on record and say that I still believe that live-blogging is a more effective way to take notes at a conference. I would much rather see a small team of good writers using ScribbleLive to record a speech that a collection of tweets from everyone in the room. A live-blog can't be hijacked the way a hashtag can - just watch the next set of trending topics. If you click through, you will find spam among the good tweets, but I'm not up for that battle.

There you have it folks. I lost the hashtag wars. I will now fight the live blog battle and try to convince people to try ScribbleLive at their next conference instead of live-tweeting the entire event.

Special thanks to @jrnoded, @extraface, @anniemal and @tombiro. Strong warriors in the Battle to Stop Hashtaggery.