This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
If you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (’#’) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a ‘hashtag,’ and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?
Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies. In fact, hashtags were first popularized during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.
You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.
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June 6, 2009 Comments Off
Take the work out of finding sites related to the one you’re browsing. SimilarSites is a user-ranked search engine designed to return a list of the most similar web sites.
Plug in a web site at SimilarSites or by using their Firefox extension SimilarWeb and you’re presented with a list of related web sites. For each site on the list you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. While our test searches returned fairly accurate results there were a few items in each search that definitely merited a thumbs down. In addition if you find a site in your search results that you’re interested in you can run a SimilarSites search on that site with a single click. If you’d like to find site suggestions by keyword instead of using an existing site as your source, check out previously reviewed Youlicit to find related web sites by keyword searches.
(Via Ian Scott.)
In one of the more intriguing surveys of recent weeks, website One News Page has found that over half of the people it surveyed will be replacing Google with Bing as their main search engine.
The news portal surveyed 1,000 people and found that 55 per cent of those who answered preferred to use Bing to search for things on the internet.
Even more unbelievable, 68 per cent of those surveyed actually liked the name Bing – they must really like Chandler from Friends – and 90 per cent said they would use the expression ‘to Bing it’.
Just Bing it!
‘Microsoft has a winner in Bing and in a couple of years it may be a force to be reckoned with,’ said Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, founder of One News Page.
‘Microsoft finds ways of entering late into mature markets and flexing its huge marketing muscles to grab substantial share.
‘My verdict is that Bing will give Google a good run for its money, and the resulting competition in the search engine market can only be a good thing.’
In other news, three out of three out of four TechRadar journalists will never say the expression ‘to Bing it’ without sniggering. And that is a fact.
(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
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