Studies on a hashtag

I'm at the EGEE09 conference this week, and they're also plugging use of tagging in social networking such as the #egee hashtag in twitter and the 'egee09' tag in flickr. As a small experiment I created an IRC channel on freenode (#EGEE09) and announced it with a hashtag on twitter. Within 3 minutes there were an additional 3 users, only one of whom was in my normal twitter cloud, ie the other 2 came in purely from the hashtag (and one of those was under a minute later)

so, twitter is certainly becoming a respectable way of broadcasting announcements to an interested group of people who are subscribing to a hashtag.

oh and as an aside, the IRC channel paid off -- I discovered that GridPP had some nice laptop bags via it and secured one for myself during coffee.

Anyway, back to more important work -- listening to how the EU proposes to carve up the funding for call7