(jeff)isageek.net Geek Entertainment Teknologist

What The Hashtag? – The 411 On Hashtags

The gang over at Microblink have a kool new service called What The Hashtag which I guess would be best described as a "user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter".

Do you get those twitter messages and wonder hmm what the hashtag #smckc or #dwgmf means? sometimes the tags are pretty obvious what they are for but then you have some that you have no clue.  Thats where What The Hashtag can help you out.

What information can I get

Some of the information you can get on a hashtag using the service is a description, related hash tags, external links related to the tag, stats, top contributors, and even the stream itself which you can then track on twitter search or pull the rss feed.

Great Tools

Not only is the site itself great to use but they also have some great tools to enhance the use of ther service including.....

TwitterBot
One of the coolest ways to interact with WTH?! is to use our bot service. In short, it's a two-way communication channel that allows you to ask us what a hashtag stands for. We'll send you back a short description plus a link back to the page we're hosting for it.

GreaseMonkey Script
If you're using Twitter's web interface in combination with the Firefox web browser, this user script is a must. Our GreaseMonkey script looks over the page you're looking at and finds all the hashtags on that page. Once it finds a tag, it replaces that hashtag with a link to its page here.

Our script doesn't stop at looking at what people are tweeting about - it will also find hashtags in a user's name, location, and bio fields and link those out as well. No other script developers (that we know of) are taking hashtag linking this far!

Firefox Search Bar
A quick way to search the web when using Firefox is through the search bar. If you want to add a search engine for WTH?!, simply pull down the list of websites and you'll see the option to add WTHashtag?! near the bottom. We've even set it up so it'll suggest things to you as you type.

Firefox Keyword Search
The fastest way to search a specific site using Firefox is through a keyword search. If you really like WTHashtag?!, right click in the search bar in the left navigation box and select "Add a Keyword for this Search". In the following dialog, enter "What the Hashtag" and "wth" in the two fields.

Related posts:

1. hashtags : tagging in twitter
2. introducing macworld.hashtags.org
3. jeffisageek blog 04/12/2008
4. MicroCast 3-24-08
5. Add Real Time Twitter Results To Your Google Search