‘Hashtag’ Is Selected As Word Of The Year By The American Dialect Society

I was involved in a twitter thread today with Ben Zimmer, who is a well-known lexicographer, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. He has been researching the Twitter hashtag, which was recently selected as Word Of The Year:

“Hashtag” is the 2012 Word of the Year American Dialect Society

In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase.

Presiding at the Jan. 4 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.

“This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Zimmer said. “In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item” — not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year. The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 124-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

One interesting wrinkle is that Zimmer contends that I was the first to use the term ‘hashtag’ back in a post on 26 August 2007. My use was a response to Chris Messina’s proposal for so-called Twitter ‘channels’, which had the form of hashtags today (like ‘#hashtag’), but apparently I was the first to use the term hashtag to denote them. I also  coined the term ‘microsyntax’ to represent the developing use of symbols — like ‘@mentions’, ‘#hashtags’, ‘RT”, ‘$ticker’ — in Twitter and related apps. (I still haven’t been successful in getting ‘/geotags’ implemented.)

Wild. 

For @chrismessina @anildash @aral et al: Who first used the term “hashtag”/”hash tag”? @stoweboyd used it on 8/27/07: stoweboyd.com/post/972058051…

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) January 6, 2013

@bgzimmer @chrismessina @aral I think the usage “hashtag” predates Chris’ post, but @stoweboyd was first to apply that to twitter.

— Anil Dash (@anildash) January 7, 2013

I didn’t even have that post up on my blog. I moved my blog several times since 2007, from Typepad (where it was called /Message), to Squarespace, and then to Tumblr. And I hadn’t reposted all the older posts, since it has to be done manually. I reposted that piece today, copying the text from the Wayback Machine.

Source: americandialect.org

6 January 2013 18 Permalink

Viggle And GetGlue Maybe Getting Glued?

Reports of Viggle’s acquisition of GetGlue might be a bit hasy, since the deal between the two social TV players is contingent on Viggle raising an additional $60M in financing.

Viggle buys GetGlue in social TV consolidation play - The AppSide

Viggle’s latest financials report reveals that in the year to 30 June 2012 its revenues were $1.7m, while its net losses were $96.5m.

$100M to build a social TV application? What are they doing with all that money? It’s preposterous. That’s more than MySpace burned through in the last year, and I thought they had set the bar.

I think the reality is that people are more likely to simply continue using Twitter or Facebook when watching TV instead of switching to a specialized app. 

Source: theappside.com

20 November 2012 21 Permalink

Twitter Attracts Users With ‘Highest Cognitive Abilities’

It appears that Twitter users — at least those in Australia, anyway — are smarter than those that favor other social networks:

The Smartest People Prefer Twitter To LinkedIn And Facebook, Research Shows [STUDY] - Shea Bennett via AllTwitter

Psychometric testing company Onetest surveyed 2,851 graduates from around Australia, exploring the outcomes (life satisfaction, salary and career progression) of people who had entered the workforce between 2002 and 2011, before cross-referencing this data against their social network of choice.

And the results? While only four percent listed Twitter as their preferred social tool, these respondents had the “highest cognitive abilities” of users across all the main social channels.

The survey revealed that Facebook was the most preferred social platform, followed by LinkedIn, but that there was no statistically significant difference between the average cognitive abilities of users other than those who favoured Twitter.

That explains a great deal about the nature of discourse at Twitter, relative to Facebook, for example.

Source: mediabistro.com

17 October 2012 72 Permalink

Union Metrics For Tumblr

I want this very much.

Union Metrics for Tumblr provides detailed Tumblr analytics for brands and marketers, helping provide insight into engagement with Tumblr campaigns and conversations.

Union Metrics for Tumblr is Tumblr’s preferred analytics provider.

For the first time ever, get analytics on any Tumblr post or topic! Search for a blog, a keyword, a tag, even content source. We have full-fidelity access to the entire firehose of Tumblr data, so your analytics are built on the highest quality data.

Union Metrics for Tumblr reporting includes:

• Post and note volume to show overall engagement levels and trends over time
• Top contributors and curators to help identify key influencers
• Analysis of posts and tags to surface most popular posts
• Post engagement details, including the full reblog tree and interactions over time

Tumblr has more-or-less endorsed the tool as a ‘preferred analytics partner’: the first of these preferred partner rleationships.

Images do better than this unspirited prose:

Note that this third image represents a Twitter cascade from a specific Tumblr post. That data is accessed from Gnip’s Twitter firehose.

Related articles

• Tumblr Blesses Its First Analytics Provider, Union Metrics (allthingsd.com)
• Tumblr Posts Analytics Platform With Union Metrics (adweek.com)
• Tumblr Gives Brands Stats (digiday.com)
• Tumblr Has an Official Analytics Tool (socialtimes.com)

4 October 2012 23 Permalink

Socialcast Is Next To Be Hit By Twitter API Use Rules

To the extent that anyone was using the Socialcast work media tool to post into the Twitter stream, they won’t be any longer:

via email

Twitter Compatible API: The Socialcast Twitter Compatible API allowed people to view a Socialcast stream, and post updates from within various Twitter Clients such as TweetDeck. On August 30, 2010, Twitter changed their approach and modified their Terms of Service. Twitter now requires that client developers adhere to “third party content” guidelines that drastically limit the ability for Twitter Clients to consume content from services like Socialcast. Due to these changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service, Socialcast will cease support for the Socialcast Twitter Compatible API on October 1, 2012.

Note: The Twitter Feed import capability is not affected by this change.

Basically, Twitter thinks it owns everything that anyone puts into the stream, and it has to stay there. Period.

This is almost as crazy as blocking IFTTT.

25 September 2012 5 Permalink

Twitter Has To Control User Experience: Does It Need To Control The Data, Too?

The controversy over Twitter’s efforts to close down non-Twitter clients and disable ‘find my friends’ capabilities raise a few questions.

Twitter wants to make money on advertising — sponsored pages and the like — which is reasonable. Let’s leave aside the idea of regulating how third party apps would present Twitter data and ads, which is probably too hard to manage, and would block the third party app vendors from innovating. 

So Twitter has to control the user experience, and the third party client apps are the victims of this slow motion train wreck. 

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out last week, Twitter isn’t an open web protocol, like email: it’s a company vying against other alternatives, like Facebook, Google+, and now, App.net. The fact that it is pivoting into a closed configuration shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially given the Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point post by Fred Wilson in April 2010, and Ev Wilson’s Twitter For iPhone post the next week. The wheels have been slowly turning, and after several management shakeups, Costolo and company have taken the final steps toward where they said they were headed.

Twitter seems unlikely to start charging us to access the service, so that source of revenue is closed. However, the Hootsuites of the world make money from companies tapping into Twitter. Aren’t they the next to go? Or shouldn’t they be paying a large slice of their revenues to Twitter? Likewise Flipboard and the other social journals?

I also wonder about the big data side. Today, Twitter seems happy to let all sorts of companies get access to the torrent of data flowing through its plumbing. But what if analysis of that stream is where the biggest value lies? Will they close that down? Will Radian6, Nexalogy, Klout, and the others get a cease-and-desist order? Or will they be paying millions to access the data?

Where will Twitter draw the line?

Related articles

• Twitter Cuts Off LinkedIn — Who’s Next? (allthingsd.com)
• Hey, Twitter - shouldn’t it be about the users? (gigaom.com)
• Twitter API updates: more authentication, fewer tweets, more rules, certification, and … talk to the hand (venturebeat.com)

27 August 2012 13 Permalink

Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings

Chris Messina has outlined (in a fairly voluminous way) a proposal for the use of hash tags (strings like “#tag”) as a way to help make sense of the noise within Twitter. He enumerates different sorts of “groups” that could be supported in Twitter, and then takes my concept of ‘groupings’ — ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest implied by a tag — and runs with it:

[from Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels]

[…]

The type that I’m most interested in, and am prepared to offer a concrete proposal on, is actually of a fourth kind, most closely related to Stowe’s “groupings”, but with a slightly different lean, primarily in the model of how the grouping is established. In the cases presented above, there are very explicit approaches taken, since it’s somewhat taken for granted that groups imply a kind of management. Whether you’re dealing with public groups that you create, join and then promote or contact groups that you ultimately must manage like any kind of mailing list, they imply an order of magnitude of work that would ultimately work against the adoption of the whole grouping premise and thereby minimize any benefits to a select group of hyper-dedicated process-followers.

I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.

I support the details of Chris’ spec. My sense is that tags in Twitter, as elsewhere, define shared experience of some kind, involving all those using the tag. And the use can be either actively putting a hash tag (like “#hashtag”) into a tweet, or more passively opting to follow a stream of tweets related to a tagged theme.

This accords exactly with the idea of groupings. I am increasingly uninterested in traditional groups in social apps: where members ‘join’, perhaps following a required invitation, and someone ‘owns’ and ‘manages’ the group. Groups have their place in the work context, but are less relevant in open socializing of individuals. Groupings can be wonderful for serendipity: consider the grouping of all people within Last.fm who have listened to a particular musician recently, or the clutch of people who have tagged a blog post with the term ‘Twitter’.

Just in passing: the failure of Technorati to make something out of the millions of groupings lost within their map of the blogosphere baffles me. I hope that some enterprising entrepreneurs begin to think about the meta-groupings that could be found across these various applications, across these apparently unrelated social media streams. A new angle for MyBlogLog, perhaps?

Tagspaces could be interesting and rich shared experiences, but no one seems to be really exploring that side of their existence. Del.icio.us has trained us to think of tags as metadata for bookmarks, and blogs have trained us to view them as metadata for posts. But tags imply communities, and no one is doing much to let those communities find themselves. Twitter hash tags could help.

[PS I looked, and the domain “www.twittosphere.com” is already taken, damn it.]

[original comments copied from Wayback Machine:

Hey Stowe, thanks for trudging through my post and inspiring large portions of it! I find that I blog so little these days, relying primarily on Twitter and Screenshots, that when I do, I often carry on with myself for days! (aside: I really need an editor!).

Anyway, I think you’re exactly right about tags. Before I wrote the post, I spent some time chatting with Thomas Vander Wal about his “come to me web” and his notion of tags. It’s identical to the one that you envisaged. I can say proudly that I finally “get it” about tags.

And you’re totally right about Technorati. If anyone could have, they had the chance to build the “come to me web” from the longtail. Instead, we have Facebook, a monolithic silo of data meted out in dollops and doses that they decide on, rather than in the rough-and-tumble, but close to humanity, way of the open web.

I think I’ve learned something here — and I think from now on, I’m going to advocate for the dissolution of hardened groups within social networks. For a long time I’ve felt that natural, organic decay is needed in these networks for them to work long term. Without death, there is no evolution. Thus, “groups” should be born the moment someone uses a tag and die the moment there’s a sustained silence in that tag’s life. What a fantastic model!

Oh, and love the new design!

Posted by: Chris Messina | August 26, 2007 at 10:42 AM

Thanks for the mention Stowe. MyBlogLog is already headed down the path you suggest with the use of groupings suggested by our users when they place tags on other members and sites.

Our search box on mybloglog.com now supports searching across the tags and adding them to the weighting and the initial results look promising for finding relevant sites that may have trouble breaking into the big search engine listings.

Check out searches for “aviation” or “hiking” for example.

Posted by: Ian Kennedy | August 26, 2007 at 10:58 AM

Hi Stowe,

Maybe you should try www.tweetosphere.com or www.tweettag.com for it relates to tweets nor twits. I still think you need a definition for these. Another option would be to use / create a tag and share it with your friends. The tag would have a unique number which may be public or private which could tie back to some definition. That way people could share the same tag for different meanings. Your twitterific or tweet-r would simply convert your #tag to the number or a tiny url to a wiki etc. Let me know what you think. 

Cheers

Posted by: stuart | August 26, 2007 at 01:03 PM

I agree that ad-hoc groupings are more interesting that explicit membership based groups. Using explicit tags may help within a Twitter stream, but I’m more in favor of implicit means to tag yourself and your experiences.

(The new design generally looks good, but the photo with your face chopped in half is disconcerting, but i’m not an artist…)

Posted by: Mike | August 28, 2007 at 10:57 PM

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26 August 2007 Permalink