Last weekend, at the blogging panel (which, by the way, was a blast) during the question and answer period, a woman asked about hashtags – “what are they?”

If she asked that, then I figured someone else in our audience might have the same question. Here is the scoop about hashtags.

A hashtag is just that little crossed symbol on your keypad that used to be called the number sign (#).

It’s used on social media (mostly Twitter but it’s on other sites, like Facebook, as well) as a way to do searches. Hashtagged words act as keywords in a search. Think about it, how many words do you know in the English language that start with #? I’m guessing that you can’t come up with many. Because of this, hashtags are used on the internet as a way to easily do searches.

Finding information with Hashtags

Let’s say I’m…