Daniel Morrison

On Tags and Hashtags

I’m at BarCamp Grand Rapids this weekend, where they’ve setup tags for us to use: barcampgrandrapids3 on most site, and #bcgr3 on twitter.

I have problems here.

  1. Standardize. Its nice that we’re thinking about a shorter tag for twitter, but we should use one tag across all services.
  2. Readability. Similar to the first point, #bcgr3 means nothing to the average person. At least #barcampgr would make sense to people who’ve heard of barcamps (and is also the name of the website).
  3. The ‘3’ is irrelevant. Every site that uses tags, also timestamps. Find me one that doesn’t, I dare you. Tagging each year’s camp the same makes it more searchable and then you can then filter based on dates if you want.
  4. Combine. Though this one probably won’t get adopted, using a combination of tags would be even more useful. If you tagged #barcamp and #grandrapids you would be searchable as the combination, and separately.

That’s all. Just wanted to rant. I hereby nominate #barcampgr as the One Tag to Rule Them All.

4 Comments

  1. Dan quotes, jr — August 17, 2008

    I would use the tag you are suggesting. Thanks for efforts !

    Dan

  2. Dave Brondsema — August 18, 2008

    Good thoughts, Daniel, they make sense. Especially, since we use barcampgr.org for our domain and @barcampgr for our twitter account. I think we should plan on using ‘barcampgr’ as our tag for future events.

  3. Kyle Adams — August 18, 2008

    Agreed with Dave. +1 for next year’s One Tag to Rule Them All.

  4. mario games — July 11, 2023

    This is an amazing and informative article that covers so much ground.