“What the hashtag?!” is a user-editable encyclopedia (ala Wikipedia) I discovered the other day to catalog and document hashtags found on Twitter.
Hashtags are the keywords you see in Tweets that start with “#”. This might be something like #bachelor to talk about the TV show, or #snOMG to discuss the massive snowstorm in the US. In China, I use one #gfwlist with other Internet users to document overseas Web sites blocked by the Great Firewall.
People are creating, using and sifting through dozens of hashtags a day, but the nomenclature is incosistent. Sometimes the tags are obvious, but oftentimes they are clever puns or inside jokes. To help people understand this new uncontrolled vocabulary, wthashtag.com was created as a dictionary to explain the hashtag’s origins and uses.
This is about as perfect a parallel to Ward Cunningham’s original purpose of the wiki you will find.
In my book (The Wikipedia Revolution) I describe Ward’s thinking process in envisioning a tool that would help people “teach each other the metaphors” that we use in life. An excerpt from my book, Chapter 3, Wiki Origins:
In his book with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff explains how humans give words meaning through metaphors, such as when we use spatial words like “high” and “low” to describe a person’s mood. To Cunningham, Lakoff’s concept resonated as a very powerful idea. In thinking about computers as the conduit for carrying messages around the Internet, he imagined metaphors spreading around and finding the right place on the Net to help. His entire quest was to find a system that supported this function, to create places to allow individuals to teach one another their metaphors.
After a decade thinking about this issue at Tektronix, Cunningham would finally discover a tool to help realize it. He happened across a brand-new software product from Apple Computer called HyperCard, which was given away for free with every Macintosh computer sold in 1987. Very quickly, people started to recognize it was something special. HyperCard was a revolutionary piece of software—it was the first easy way to make free-form hyperlinked content, allowing people to click on items on the screen to bring up other text. Unfortunately, Apple had no idea what a breakthrough product it had on its hands.
With the HyperCard experience, Ward would go on to create prototypes for what would eventually become the first wiki software on the Internet. And today, wikis are doing exactly what he described — helping people explain their use of new jargon to each other.
The site can be found here: http://wthashtag.com
Another (and better, IMHO) compendium of hashtags is tagal.us
I like tagalus better because you can just reply to the account on twitter to define a search term. Sometimes a wiki is slower than another option.
Nice find. WTHashtag does have the same type of bot functionality here: http://wthashtag.com/wiki/WTHashtag%3F!:TwitterBot
Thanks for the review. We’re gushing right now having WTH?! being compared as “a parallel to Ward Cunningham’s original purpose of the wiki”.
We realize there are other tools out there for tracking and defining hashtags, but we felt the wiki was the best way to share and disseminate the information. Also, we’re continuing to make improvements based on user feedback (like being able to submit definitions to the wiki via public Twitter reply).
I’d like to throw in my vote for @tagalus as well – not only is there fully functional Twitter awareness, but all of the tags (they have a larger index right now, btw) have definitions, whereas it seems that the majority don’t on WTH
Exceptional post however , I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Appreciate it!
Hi there! I could have sworn I’ve been to this site before but after checking through some of the post I realized it’s new to me. Anyways, I’m definitely happy I found it and I’ll be book-marking and checking back frequently!