21 December 2009 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy
Some people trace the origin of the hashtag to Chris Messina, who helped start BarCamp, and he certainly has a 2007 dated blog post which captures an early suggestion for the methodology.
Interestingly, Messina refers to the '#' symbol as 'pound'. That's an Americanism people used to dialing into American powered phone conference facilities will be familiar with. The fact that the rather more British term 'hash' for the symbol was picked up is evidence of the weight the UK has on Twitter.
One of the most popular British hashtags is #uksnow.
The tag is closely associated with developer Ben Marsh's rather excellent mashup of maps and tweets which plots the course of snow across the UK. Twitter users tweet #uksnow, the first bit of their post code and a snow rating – 4/10 for light snow fall, for example – and a snowflake of the appropriate size appears on the map.
Last week Julian Bray, a journalist and speaker in London, stepped forward to claim he had coined the hashtag initially – to report snow fall for travel purposes – and wanted recognition. His blog says;
"You have to understand, the first Ben Marsh UKsnow map didn't give details of the tweets, so in effect hijacked my information hashtag for his own program."
Later, he adds;
"Don't get me wrong, the NEW UKsnow map from @Benmarsh does the job very well, as he now incorporates the twitter feed but it would take very little to acknowledge that he didn't start it all off and that a lot of other people got the ball rolling before he came along...
That would satisfy the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in the UK and I'd be more than happy to grant a licence for UKsnow and SnowUK...."
The hashtag has been such a popular success it's easy to imagine why Mr Bray would like some recognition.
Blogger Paul Clarke, who was part of the initial group of people to get the hashtag pushed in to common usage, and who blogged about it in February asks whether this is the right approach. In a more recent blog post on the debate around the ownership of the tag he asks,
"Is that a serious question? IP in a hashtag? That the originator wasn't keen about having formatting applied to back in February in any case?"
The expectation is that squabbles over not just hashtags but account names on Twitter will continue and rise in 2010.
More than snowball fights for #uksnow
Twitter hashtags are the equivalent of Twitter meta data. They've been adopted by the community to help express what a particular tweet is about. A comment that includes #uksnow is about the snow in the UK. A comment that includes #ratm4xmas is one about the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine the number one Christmas slot.Some people trace the origin of the hashtag to Chris Messina, who helped start BarCamp, and he certainly has a 2007 dated blog post which captures an early suggestion for the methodology.
Interestingly, Messina refers to the '#' symbol as 'pound'. That's an Americanism people used to dialing into American powered phone conference facilities will be familiar with. The fact that the rather more British term 'hash' for the symbol was picked up is evidence of the weight the UK has on Twitter.
One of the most popular British hashtags is #uksnow.
The tag is closely associated with developer Ben Marsh's rather excellent mashup of maps and tweets which plots the course of snow across the UK. Twitter users tweet #uksnow, the first bit of their post code and a snow rating – 4/10 for light snow fall, for example – and a snowflake of the appropriate size appears on the map.
Last week Julian Bray, a journalist and speaker in London, stepped forward to claim he had coined the hashtag initially – to report snow fall for travel purposes – and wanted recognition. His blog says;
"You have to understand, the first Ben Marsh UKsnow map didn't give details of the tweets, so in effect hijacked my information hashtag for his own program."
Later, he adds;
"Don't get me wrong, the NEW UKsnow map from @Benmarsh does the job very well, as he now incorporates the twitter feed but it would take very little to acknowledge that he didn't start it all off and that a lot of other people got the ball rolling before he came along...
That would satisfy the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in the UK and I'd be more than happy to grant a licence for UKsnow and SnowUK...."
The hashtag has been such a popular success it's easy to imagine why Mr Bray would like some recognition.
Blogger Paul Clarke, who was part of the initial group of people to get the hashtag pushed in to common usage, and who blogged about it in February asks whether this is the right approach. In a more recent blog post on the debate around the ownership of the tag he asks,
"Is that a serious question? IP in a hashtag? That the originator wasn't keen about having formatting applied to back in February in any case?"
The expectation is that squabbles over not just hashtags but account names on Twitter will continue and rise in 2010.
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