Are You Experienced? #Hashtag History and Use

Good Day World!

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover.

No more than you can judge a #hash tag by several words. Oh, wait a moment! Yes, you can. Let me explain.

If you’re a non-techie type and don’t know what a hash tag is, the following information will set you straight.

ORIGIN of HASHTAGS

The number sign was often used in information technology to highlight a special meaning. In 1970 for example, the number sign was used to denote immediate address mode in the assembly language of the PDP-11 when placed next to a symbol or a number.

In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie used # in the C programming language for special keywords that had to be processed first by the C preprocessor.

Since before the invention of the hash tag, the number sign has been called the "hash symbol" in some countries outside of North America.

The number sign then appeared and was used within IRC networks to label groups and topics. Channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a hash symbol # (as opposed to those local to a server, which use an ampersand '&').

The use of the number sign in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the micro blogging network. He posted the first hash tag on Twitter:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

—Chris Messina, ("factoryjoe"), August 23, 2007

Internationally, the hash tag became a practice of writing style for Twitter posts during the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests, as both English- and Persian-language hash tags became useful for Twitter users inside and outside Iran.

The first use of the term "hash tag" was in a blog post by Stowe Boyd, "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings,"on 26 August 2007, according to lexicographer Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee.

Beginning July 2, 2009, Twitter began to hyperlink all hash tags in tweets to Twitter search results for the hash tagged word (and for the standard spelling of commonly misspelled words).

In 2010, Twitter introduced "Trending Topics" on the Twitter front page, displaying hash tags that are rapidly becoming popular. Twitter has an algorithm to tackle attempts to spam the trending list and ensure that hash tags trend naturally. (via Wikipedia)

Time for me to walk on down the road…