Today I actually found myself at a web site called hashtags.org. THERE’S
someplace I never thought I would ever be. If you don’t know what a hashtag
is, consider yourself tragically un-hip, but if you are guessing, no, it
isn’t a price sticker for a Hormel product.
A hashtag is a way of calling attention to your tweets to those who
“subscribe” to the tag. I can explain no further.
Okay, I’ll try. First, a hashtag looks like this: #.ff or #jobs, for
example. The hash mark is the number sign, which is shift-3 on the number
row.
This would be a bit tricky if you are on a screen reader, as my screen
reader will attempt a pronunciation whether or not it reads an actual word.
You could slam your fists down on the keyboard and Zoomtext will attempt to
read it aloud. this makes for some really funny moments, especially once
you begin to realize that playing around with certain characters can alter
the way a word or sentence is read. Add a tilda (~) to a sentence, and
hilarity ensues.
There are some good Twitter tutorials out there, go to your favorite search
engine and type in: Twitter in plain English. You’ll get some articles and
primers on the subject. Some Twitter conventions were not implemented by
the Twitterati themselves, rather, the Twitter-obsessed community, now
referred to collectively as ‘Tweeple.” It’s all rather ingenious, once you
find the Twitterosetta stone. For you text-to-speech users, that was
“Twitter Rosetta Stone.”
The endless Twitter puns are pretty fun, too.
LL
“Tweeple” sounds much better than “Twits”, I’ll give them that much.