Visualize this incident: a driver reaches a junction and is about to move into the main "road". A motorcycle rider is coming up the main road while cruising at roughly 20-30km/h. His bike is heavily loaded. The motorcycle rider then punches his horn on which lets out a blaring noise (most motorcycles nowadays have got very loud electric horns) which kind of shakes the car driver. The car driver halts thus letting the motorcycle rider to pass first before he joins into the main road. Does that seem funny? One by-stander was so amused by this spectacle that he had to ask this question: Since when did motorcycle riders start hooting to vehicle owners so as to get their way? OK, this is Kenya. Many vehicle owners consider motorcycle riders as those pesky road users on two wheels.
Back to some serious stuff now. Many microblogging sites have hashtags as one of their features. By simply appending a hash, "#", to a word, the word becomes a link. Clicking on this link will bring up all posts with that hashtag. Hashtagging, if I can call it that, is just one of the ways of effecting categorization.
Here is a little history of where this concept came from. Joshua Schaster, the guy who started the social bookmarking site Delicio.us, had a file of 20000 links. As a way of trying to quickly access some link from the file, he started appending hashes to some little information he added to each link. With this system, he could easily grep any word with a hash thus easily bringing up the particular link he was searching for. From this we can see that hashtags are quite beneficial when it comes to doing searches for particular posts/tweets/notices in any microblogging site.
How are they mostly used then? There is no any hard rule of how one should use them; that's left to the user. Mainly, if you would want to prominently show a particular word on the post, you mostly hashtag that word. But there are 2 ways in which hashtags are mostly used:

1.  Do you remember this post that I had posted some time back: the line between spamming and promoting in microblogs?. Yup. That's just one of the ways hashtags are used.
2. To create Trending Topics: This is Twitter-specific. If a group of users are using a particular hashtag continuously in their posts, that hashtag may turn out to be a trending topic on Twitter that day. For example, some of the hashtags by #KenyansonTwitter that have turned out to be trending topics are: #rutoplaylist and #KCPEresults. And I thought that we weren't a crowd on the site!

REMEMBER: To create a hashtag, the words need to be stringed without any spaces in between; much like Camelcase wording in wikis. Hyphens break up the words which you would like to hashtag; so please leave them out.

Permalink