PLA Blog

A while back, I wrote a sort of Twitter 101 post. A lot has change since that post, almost a year ago… Twitter got huge, people started getting creative with it, and now there’s this urge to expand it’s feature base. One of the features that seems to be lacking in Twitter, but a given in many other online applications, is the ability to tag.

However there is something called “hashtags” for Twitter. I won’t go into too much explanation here (if you want a nice rundown of the magic of hashtags, check out this post), but basically, if you add a # (hash) sign before a keyword — like, say, #pla08 — there are now applications floating around out there built by Twitter lovers that that aggregate those tweets together in a single place (the feature isn’t an integral part of Twitter… yet). That way, if you want to see up-to-the-moment microblog posts on a specific topic, if someone has “hashtagged” it, you can track it. Makes Twitter a bit more manageable for those who don’t want the brain dump of the world from a fire hose. ;D

Lots of conference goers have been using hashtags to document other conferences. So I wanted to give something a go for PLA.

If you’re here at the PLA conference, or if you’re attending the Virtual Conference, and you happen to use Twitter, place the #pla08 hashtag in front of any tweet you might want to share with the world about the conference. (If you’re new at this: You can put it at the beginning or end of the tweet, whatever works for you, it’ll still get picked up.) Looking for people to eat with? Wondering where that party is? Sharing what you’re learning in a session? Feel free to hashtag your tweet.

I’m going to add a widget to the home page of the PLA Blog that will show real-time Tweets that carry the #pla08 hashtag, that will look like this (it’ll take me a little bit to get it just right, after I finish this post):

PLA 2008 on Twitter

• @andreamercado: #pla08 in effect. If you’re at the conference, use the hash tag in your conference Tweets. Have a plan, will post to the PLABlog soon. 25 minutes ago

If you would rather see a web page that shows you all of the #pla08 tweets, you can check out the #pla08 page on Twemes.com. Twemes is one of several hashtag tracking toys (you can read more about tracking toys and the possibilities here), and I was thinking maybe it would be the easiest (and fastest) way to throw together this little experiment.

Why pla08 and not the more traditional pla2008? Since Twitter allows only 140 characters per tweet, the shorter the hashtag, the more space there is for you to say something!

Experiments are cool. Let’s see how this goes…