What's a Hashtag?

Recently, I have seen a lot of hype surrounding the hashtag. For a while, I had no idea what it was or what it meant. Finally, someone pointed out to me that it's that slanted pound sign thing that's all over Twitter, and recently infiltrating the book. Before long it will probably be in emails, text messages and possibly in everyday talk. My guess is mostly in the tween market, and slowly they would bring it to HS and then it would skip over college, because that's just not that cool, and go straight to the parental circuit who don't understand what it is but use it anyway.

From what I gather, you just tack a hashtag to a thought, like #thoughtyoushouldknow or #icantthinkofanymoreexamples. Actually, that last one I just made up because I've become so accustomed to ignoring them, but I assume that's something that you can do with them. I don't know though, I could be wrong. But what do they represent? Are there any rules to these things? Do they follow a specific formula? Do they have to have a page on twitter to give them credibility? Can anyone make them up? These are all questions that wikipedia does not answer for me. Ok. I just did another google search (I need to make sure I am an informed writer afterall) and according to Twitter, they're used for keywords or "trends" but that doesn't exactly tell me anything.

But besides the basic rules, does it link you to something Twitter related? Are the people at Twitter just making page after page after page of sayings that someone might consider to say after a hashtag? If that were true, can you imagine the Twitter offices? At that point just hire someone to rattle of random ideas that could one day, potentially become a keyword or trend. Get a kid to just start talking and have a team of fast typing hashtag enthusiasts to design at will. I doubt that's how it works though--again I don't know.

Even my fave USA show, Psych, understands what the heck it is since they have this thing on Facebook now called the "Hastag Killer" and I'll be honest, I don't really understand what exactly that is either (i'll put it on my list of things to investigate and report back later) but it's got this hashtag thing so I suppose it's trendy. Leave it to me to not know anything about it until way after the fact, but maybe I'll start signing off with these things and maybe I'll catch on.

#maybebingwillprovidebettersearchresultsforhashtags