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brand and celeb tags

Noah Brier's celeb tags and brand tags sites is a crowdsourced tagging game that asks participants to tag a brand or celebrity and then see how others have tagged the brand or celeb. The game can be played in reverse as well, by viewing a tag cloud and trying to guess what the brand or celeb is.

I tried to take screenshots, but the celebrities' tag results were full of nonsensical tags. Someone decided to game the site obviously to fill it with tags that take over the results pages because of the variable font sizing of cloud tags. The brand tags site actually worked better in terms of having better tags.

http://celebtags.com/

Twitter Hashtags

I'm just coming across the idea of hashtags for creating groupings on Twitter after seeing them in factoryjoe's tweets and following a link from merylkevans to the page Twitter Fan Wiki on hashtags. This is a great example of how new uses of an application emerge can be defined by users.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku's channels.

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags