I started using twitter about a week before I was hired for a job where I’d be in charge of social media. Coincidentally, I made my profile about an hour after the interview was scheduled. I wasn’t too worried, after all I’d had a facebook since the days where .edu mattered, and a MySpace before that. What was it that twitter had to offer that these other sites did not provide?

Well, let me name a few:

This was all easy to pick up on after I managed to follow about five friends and twenty of my favorite nonprofits, comedians, brands, and then another twenty news-outlets.

The only thing that left me confuddled was their method of searching. You can search for anything. Say you search for “Lynda Foster,” you will get results from anyone who wrote that in any post, and on the side bar people with the name, or tag name, Lynda Foster (me!). But if you searched for #lyndafoster, you would only see comments that specifically used the exact phrase #lyndafoster. Indeed, useing the hash tag (hash tag = #) makes those words pop out in searches, and allows you to create something that is “trending.”

When you make a hash tag on twitter, it turns blue and people can click on it to be taken to a page that shows all the latest posts with that hash tag. If your post is on that thread then people with similar interests browsing the thread will have a chance to see it (possibly giving you publicity or increasing your followers).

Hashtags are used to describe a theme in a very short way (remember, 160 characters to work with). Some of them start up and last a few weeks, some of them are used by one person once and are never picked up by others, and some of them become universally understood and, by declaration of mass use, official.

I feel compelled to point out the risks using hashtags. When something is “trending” it is used by so many people it is amongst the most popular topics in the world, and gets listed on the twitter main page. Often this is for a reason. When #notguilty was trending, the business that tweeted: “Who’s #notguilty about eating all the tasty treats they want?!” took a lot of PR heat. The hashtag #notguilty was trending because of that whole Casey Anthony “not guilty” verdict controversy, and it was considered offensive that a company would try to profit off of it.

So, in order to help your understanding of political hash tags, and to help any of your political tweets make it onto threads, below are some a list of hash tags, mostly “official,” used within Washington state and national politics. If I’m missing some (especially funny topics that I did not research in detail) post them in the comment section! I may add it to the list.

General WA state political terms:
#WAleg: Washington Legislature (heavily used when session is in)
#WAGov: Washington Government (often interchangeable with WAleg)
#WABudget: Washington Budget (I don’t see this that often, but during budget negotiations it’s a topic to follow)
#WAdem: Washington democrats
#wcot: Washington conservatives
#WAgop: Washington Republicans, or “Grand Old Party”

National Political Hash tags:
#tcot: Generally, top conservatives on twitter. But there are a few “fun” definitions if you follow the link.
#GOP: Republican, or “Grand Old” party
#HCR: Health Care Reform
#P2: (As defined on tagdef.com) A resource for progressives using social media who prioritize diversity and empowerment, the “progressive batchannel”, and an umbrella tag for information for progressives on Twitter. There is now simple directory of progressives associated with the #p2 tag.

This last election:
#waelex – Washington election (used during this last primary)
#99tunnel – Things related to the referendum in Seattle on whether or not to dig the tunnel in Seattle.
#SaveMetro – The Seattle metro campaign (it’ll do better then Prop 1 in Pierce County did)
#Tacoma school board – The only word to get linked is “Tacoma” but it’s what Dextor Gordon’s campaign was using.
#Tacoma city council – Sure, it was only used once according to my search results, but you get the picture.

Serious topical hash tags:
#FAA: (national) Related to the FFA budget issue that was going on a few weeks back.
#StopGregoire: References that the Freedom Foundation is suing Washington Governor Christine Gregoire for her (allegedly) illegal use of “executive privilege” to hide public information from Washington citizens.
#Compromise: (national) Encouraged by President Obama during the debt ceiling debate to urge republican law makers to compromise.
#supercommittee: (national, and hey, Patty Murray!) The committee of 12 congressmen and senators who will have to negotiate a plan to reduce the deficit, as decided in the debt limit compromise.
#Amesdebate – (national) Referencing the recent Ames debate in Iowa.
#debtceiling – (national) You have probably heard of this.

Less serious topical hash tags (I didn’t look too hard for these, there are definitely many more):
#AccordingtoPalin: Created by the Daily Show after Sarah Palin’s Paul Revere gaff.
#ChangeUCanStepN: As in: “Makes sense that Obama’s black BS bus looks like a hearse. It carries the death of America’s hopes, dreams, & future. #tcot #ChangeUCanStepN”

Painfully obvious things I won’t explain (but are still used so often they deserve a mention):
#teaparty
#jobs
#economy
#education
#debt

“What is that orange bar creeping on the bottom of my screen?” you may be asking yourself.

“Why are you talking to your computer?” I’ll politely respond.

In all seriousness, you likely have noticed that The Melon has inserted a social media bar created by wibiya onto the entirety of our site. The bar provides hot links to a ton of social media pages like our facebook page, our twitter, videos we’ve made on youtube and even a link to donate to keep us rolling (hint: donate to keep The Melon rolling. We do all of our work pro-bono, just so you know).

What’s more is the new bar provides ways to connect to other real live people by sharing articles you like on facebook and twitter or joining a live chat when there are other Melonites perusing the site. (I’m going to make an effort to be on that chat if you ever want to drop me a line.)

So what was the impetus for adding this bar? Sure, we’d love more donations from you lovely people. But what we’d like to see most of all is interaction.

We, at The Melon, like to think we provide a lot of good resources, media, information and discussion opportunities and we want to see that continue to happen and in higher volume. Already since adding the bar, we’ve seen more sharing of articles on facebook and twitter and hope that will lead to more eyes and more discussion therefore more interest in what we’re doing and more opportunities to create more work. We’re hoping that this bar will help to sustain a cycle of buzz and discussion that will keep The Melon juicy.

That being said, your opinion is far more important. Is the bar and eyesore? Do you use it? Do you like it? Do you want it gone? If the bar was made out of cheese, would you eat it? Let me know what you think about it. If enough people don’t like it then I’m happy to banish it back into the bowels of the internet. Until then, I hope you’ll give it a try and help The Melon and all of the great stuff that we do reach your friends and beyond.

Sincerely,

Elliot Trotter
Creative Manager, The Melon

In the age of decontextualization, the growing masses of self-important messages have plagued the internet with gossip-like banality in ways no one could have foreseen.  While the off post may find its way to usefulness, the majority of tweets, status updates, and blahs drip with undeniable thoughtlessness. As caretakers of the thinking few, The Melon is pleased to offer this frequent commentary of the worse SIM of the day to awaken the inner scrutineer within us all.

And today’s winner is:

iamjacobblack

kim kardashian was on the teen choice awards…so watching them was not gay

Close second:

MattyTets

Gi Joe= great fucking movie

I encourage you to post your own in the comments as you find them.

Note: this may get us into trouble. We’ll see what happens if that happens.

Now you can connect to The Melon via all of those fun little online gizmos:

Twitter

Facebook

You Tube

Vimeo

Minutaur (BRAND NEW!)

Won’t you be our friend?

Some rumors came out today that Facebook may be planning to open source it’s Facebook Platform. For awhile now, the Facebook Platform has allowed other social networking sites to integrate themselves with Facebook, but these companies have always had to make some sort of deal with Facebook before getting access to all the resources to do it. Open sourcing it would allow any website to connect to Facebook without getting Facebook’s permission first. This would open up Facebook to be used by more people and applications, ultimately increasing its value as a social network (at least in theory). In any case, it should be a good move for users since we may no longer have to create a new profile on every social network site we want to be a part of.

Many see this as a response to MySpace and Google’s Open Social platform which is a similar open source, cross-site social networking system. The whole space of social networking sites is still very fluid and should be interesting to see how it all shakes out over the next few years. Hopefully, though, we can move to a system that allows you to have one account that can be changed in one place and have those changes reflected on many sites.

It seems clear to me that the next stage in informatic integration is break down the barriers that exist between the innumerable platforms and content online. The next stage should be “mash up” of everything that exists so far, so that all the redundant content is no longer separable. For example, as an opinion in the Economist writes, how can one move furniture from Second Life into the newer metaverses like Entropia? This is not possible today, given modern conditions of production and exchange. But arguably, there is a greater metaverse out there, one in which all online content can be exchanged and flow fluidly to and from the existing “gated communities,” if you will.

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