hashtag surfing

by jelliphiish

I’ve taken to changing the location for hastags in twitter. I pick somewhere with a character set I can in no way read and then go click through the top ten. This morning’s was Tokyo. Shindanmaker is kinda fun.

It’s interesting to see what’s locally important to the twittersphere.. cultural snapshotting. You can kinda get some of that effect if people you follow are somewhat localised to each other.. there was all that MayorBumbleFuck in Canada a while back.. seemed a bunch of people I follow all cared about it so I got a second-remove viewpoint of it.

It happens with other smaller time-duration events too. There was a small earthquake a few months back and within a very short time I knew a swathe of things about a part of the planet I’ve never visited. I guess it helps that it was in a technically dense location.. west-coast America being the location in this case, it was all over everywhere. A personal scale to the feed as it occurred.

The recent Nepal earthquake had a similar informational wavefront, but a very different feel.. not people posting, more organisational instead. But again, probably more a feature of the sources than anything else.

so, surfing hashtags with a surprise to it’s outcome. It does some similar things and I like the unexpected nature of what I find.

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Addendum, by way of apology. I wrote this entirely because I had a new (first!) follower this morning and figured it might be worth putting something here. Patcadigan, this might be your fault. it is the first thing that sprang to mind in a haze of panics.. Sorry it’s not up to much..

Jelliphiish