Serving up the Hash

This is a brief test of new (and old) hashtag developments on several of our linked social systems, now including Facebook. Honestly, we do not expect this to amount to much, but in the online battle for advertising, we must try anything…

Hashtag Use and Abuse

“Tagging” is now so over used (when allowed) that it produces more static than clean signal. Readers searching by hashtag find more glut than goodies in their results; fewer and fewer are taking time to scan through the results list.

Even when content is tagged legitimately, only that which has established popularity gets noticed… or pushed to the top of the results by the system in question. Some taggers monitor “trending” tags and use them illegitimately to get attention for content unrelated to their tags.

Top-Down Placement

Networking news out of a central site/page through all connected social systems requires using an RSS feed or similar service. It gets even worse if you use a social system page as your central location.

Some social systems accept input from an autonomous website but not from other social systems. Even when settings for the feed deliver whole articles, rarely do these systems allow the entire article to appear. And often a special third party app/service is required, which truncates content even more.

Thereby, all hashtags have to be placed at the top of the article to be certain they reach every connected system. This further reduces content that will appear on linked social pages.

NOTE: Hashtags in this article (only five related to our novel series) have been placed in a hidden text block at the top of this article. We prefer not to annoy readers on our own site.

We will see if any of the social systems pick up these hidden tags. So here ends the test and, hopefully, we did not annoy you (too much). Thank you for your tolerance.