Last week I participated in my first rapid-paced, hashtagged chat on Twitter. The hashtag being used was #journchat, an idea developed by PR pro Sarah Evans (@PRsarahevans) to be “a weekly (Mon 7-10pm CST) conversation [between] journalists, bloggers and PR folks.”

How it Works

The way that it works is that everyone logs on to Twitter with their favorite hashtag tracking tool (Tweet Grid, Tweet Deck, Twitter Search), then the moderator poses a few questions and everyone starts responding, making sure to include the #journchat hashtag. Sarah also has a great post on the #journchat site explaining the concept.

Twitter at the Speed of Light, Focused on Journalism

Though I’ve talked before about how I feel that Twitter actually fits somewhere between instant messaging and email, the #journchat discussions almost feel as if they are moving at a faster pace than chatrooms. With a tool like Tweet Grid, which updates with new tweets in real-time, hitting the stop button every once in a while is almost necessary just to keep up with the discussion, but it’s entirely worth it.

Whether you’re a journalist, public relations expert or a blogger, you’ve got to check out #journchat. The number of new connections, thoughts and ideas you’ll walk away with are worth every minute.

For More Information

Stop by the official website, search for the hashtag or follow @journchat on Twitter (used to moderate the weekly discussions).

#080808 was a meme that made some headway across different platforms, with Flickr doing their own 888 campaign and of course all of the Twitter fanfare, but since I’ve begun microblogging I’ve never seen a meme take hold like #mangavatar.

I first heard about it on Twitter when I was Hahloing through my timeline on a Friday evening, noticing that most of my friends had recently changed their avatars to cartoon manga characters. As it turns out, chatter on Twitter about mangavatars goes as far back as three months ago (according to Twitter Search) when Mystiria (@mystiria) uploaded her new avatar and tweeted about it to her friends.

The site everyone is using is called Face Your Manga, and it allows users to select from an assortment of different features and accessories to create a manga replica of themselves.

The phenomenon seemed to hit the mainstream microblogging communities only recently as now is when I’ve seen the most real-life photographs being exchanged for Japanese manga cartoons with similar likenesses.

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The emergence of hashtags in microblogging is one of the most significant innovations in the way memes and topics are tracked in the Web 2.0 world.

What’s a hashtag?

A hashtag is a combination of the pound symbol (#) followed by a keyword, generally associated with whatever topic is being tracked.

An example of a hashtag someone might use is #sxsw, which would be placed in the context of a message talking about or discussing the South by Southwest conference, as seen below.

Why should hashtags be used?

The biggest reason to use hashtags in your messages is to make it easier for others to connect and follow the topics you are talking about. I can post about a topic as much as I want, but only the people who are following my messages will see them. When I include a hashtag, someone else could do a search for the hashtag using a site like Twemes or Twitter Search and see all the messages about that topic.

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