#Pittsburgh – Hashtags for Pittsburgh

Chris Brogan (he writes a great blog on social media that I follow daily) had a post last week on how to help in Haiti – in the post he links to a great post – Designing Hashtags for Emergency Response, by Chris Messina from the blog Factory City.  Messina’s post offers some great thoughts on creating hashtags for twitter and he links to the Epic Project EPIC from the University of Colorado at Boulder – which is working on Tweak the Tweet – a standard group of hashtags for tweeting information in Haiti.

What the hashtag? If you are not a regular on Twitter you are probably reading this and wondering what on earth does a hashtag have to do with anything on Twitter or Haiti.  Since I have gotten a few phone calls and emails asking about this in the past week let me take a moment to review the hashtag.

First of all if you are new to Twitter – check out this video from the folks at CommonCraft – Twitter in Plain English – 2:30 will help you understand what Twitter is and how it works.

From the Twitter Support Page on Hashtags:

Because Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data, the Twitter community came up with their own way: hashtags. A hashtag is similar to other web tags- it helps add tweets to a category. Hashtags have the ‘hash’ or ‘pound’ symbol (#) preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday, #hashtag. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet: some people just add a # before a word they’re using

You can then see what people are tweeting about a particular topic by visiting http://search.twitter.com and searching for a specific hashtag – if you want to see tweets about the Steelers – you can search for #steelers. The results will be a list of any tweet that includes “#steelers”.  The hashtag is helpful for conferences and events – for example – during the G20 – you could follow related tweets by searching for #G20.

More Hashtag Resources – check out Tagal.us and Hashtweeps.com – both sites offer a directory of hashtags.  The wikipedia page for Hashtags offers lots more info about hashtags too.

#Pittsburgh – What are some Pittsburgh Hashtags?

So this had me thinking about Pittsburgh hashtags – what hashtags are you using here in Pittsburgh – lets put together a little hashtag directory for Pittsburgh hashtags so we can follow the local conversation.

Here are few that I use or I have seen:

• #pgh
• #steelers
• #shoppgh
• #pghsnow

What hashtags do you use?  What hash tags would you want to see in the Pgh Hash Tag directory?

Some additional reading about Twitter and hashtags…

• HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business (mashable.com)
• Twitter Tools – Decoding the Social Networking Hash Tag Mystery (socialmediatoday.com)
• Three steps to getting started in Twitter (socialwebschool.com)
• How To Use Twitter Syntax Like A Novice & Pro (evolyte.com)
• Hone In On Hashtags (twitterrati.com)