Twitter How-to: Use hashtags

Have you been staring at your Twitter homepage sidebar, wondering what the # symbol in front of the words under the "Trending Topics" heading means? Twitter, as a microblogging tool, utilizes a popular and useful macroblogging device — tags. On Twitter, they're called hashtags (#tags for short), and they're a way for twitterers to tag their tweets with general categories, themes, and ideas, allowing for easy searching and browsing of topics. In other words, you can tweet about a general topic without having to explicitly type the topic at hand. For example, say you want to discuss the economy. You can write, "Dow Jones isn't doing too well today," followed by the #economy tag. People who read your tweet can click the #economy link and see yours and all the other tweets on Twitter with the same tag, or they can type the tag into Twitter's search bar and get the same results. It's a simple and relatively organized way to accumulate the latest updates on your favorite topics.