At our edSocialMedia Bootcamp this past February, the first thing we had participants do was to create a Twitter account and asked them to use the #edSocialMedia hash tag anytime they twittered that day.  Hash tags are a great way to follow events without following people.

By using http://search.twitter.com or http://hashtags.org anyone could quickly follow what people were saying by searching for the hashtag.  We uStreamed  edSocialMedia and hashtags allowed us to f0llow what folks were saying about the conference inside the room and out.

A non-conference example of using hash tags is the #gr8t twitter meme.  This is a way for twitterers to identify great tweets by re-tweeting (RT) them with the #gr8t hash tag.  Then anyone who searches Twitter for that tag can see great tweets that have been identified by people.  Here’s a link to the most recent #gr8t tweets.

Here are some of the tweets from the edSocialMedia conference:

Check out this link for all of the tweets that are using the #edSocialMedia hash tag.

How have you used hash tags?  Any good stories?