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#hashtags

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Hashtags are a funny old thing which seem to have sprouted up from nowhere and now run people's jobs, businesses and even lives. I have been pondering this phenomenon on two occasions in the past week - once when my mother asked me what a hashtag was and another incident in which a friend of mine showed me a series of text messages from a man who clearly has no understanding of the function of a hashtag whatsoever and just #usesittosayeverything #eventhingslike #becauseimstalkingyou #don'tworry #i'mnotreally #oramI?

According to Wikipedia...

"A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #. It is a form of metadata tag. Short messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Twitter, Tout, identi.ca, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Google+ or Facebook may be tagged by putting "#" before important words, as in:
#Wikipedia is an #encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it."

Chris Messina first used a hashtag on Twitter in 2007 after being inspired by the way that IRC networks used the hashtag to label groups, topics and individual messages. This was the first ever tweet including a hashtag...

“ how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? ”
—Chris Messina, ("factoryjoe"), August 23, 2007

Another use of early hashtagging was by San Diego resident Nate Ritter, who included #sandiegofire in his posts during the wildfires hitting San Diego County in October 2007. During the 2009-2010 Iranian election protests, the hashtag became useful for English and Persian speakers inside and outside of Iran.

Beginning July 1, 2009, Twitter began to hyperlink all hashtags in tweets to Twitter search results for the hashtagged word (and for the standard spelling of commonly misspelled words). In 2010, Twitter introduced "Trending Topics" on the Twitter front page, displaying hashtags that are rapidly becoming popular.

It turns out that the humble # actually holds a vast amount of power and influence. Instagram has just revealed that is has blocked a large number of hashtags and made them unsearchable, most of them expletives.

Here is the list for you to save you wasting any more time tagging those nude pictures... 

#sex: This is mostly because Instagram does not want to go the same way as Tumblr in becoming a port for adult or sexual content which does not bode well for prospective advertisers. You can also include most other porn words associated with this in the banned list.

#kikmeboys: Two tags that might be used by prostitutes gathering clients on the messaging service Kik are also banned: #kikmeboys and #kikmenow.

#thinspo: Commonly used by people who promote eating disorders as a weightloss method. Other banned thinspo tags include #thinspiration, #loseweight, #proanorexia, and #probulimia.

#whitepower: Also banned are words that reference racism, like #whitepower. Clearly, Instagram is hoping that racist accounts don't go viral. 

#popular: Instagram has also banned searches for terms that might be used by people trying to game the system in a quest for building massive (but fake) audiences: #photography, #popula,r and #popularpage.

Here is the rest of the list - while some of these hashtags do contain four-letter words, it's not clear why Instagram thought they were so threatening, or so negative, that they needed to be restricted:

#DuckDynastyBitch

#fyouhitler

#fpsy

#thesexpistols

#beautyandessex

#iphone

#iphone4s

#iPhone5 is, however, searchable on Instagram. 

According to the Instagram management platform Webstagram, these were the 100 most popular hastags on the 15th May 2013..

1.  #love - 143,817,139 photos
2.  #instagood - 97,570,915 photos
3.  #me - 80,693,198 photos
4.  #tbt - 75,411,509 photos
5.  #cute - 75,047,873 photos
6.  #photooftheday - 70,995,806 photos
7.  #instamood - 64,925,462 photos
8.  #beautiful - 54,570,181 photos
9.  #picoftheday - 53,776,027 photos
10.  #igers - 52,997,258 photos
11.  #girl - 52,960,538 photos
12.  #instadaily - 51,313,415 photos
13.  #iphonesia - 51,124,375 photos
14.  #follow - 46,372,281 photos
15.  #tweegram - 44,656,230 photos
16.  #happy - 43,360,681 photos
17.  #summer - 42,718,347 photos
18.  #instagramhub - 42,101,798 photos
19.  #bestoftheday - 40,202,550 photos
20.  #iphoneonly - 39,287,795 photos
21.  #igdaily - 36,932,129 photos
22.  #fashion - 35,815,277 photos
23.  #webstagram - 35,073,684 photos
24.  #picstitch - 34,965,202 photos
25.  #nofilter - 34,196,209 photos
26.  #sky - 33,913,231 photos
27.  #jj - 33,899,949 photos
28.  #followme - 33,865,057 photos
29.  #fun - 33,069,338 photos
30.  #smile - 30,236,252 photos
31.  #like - 29,636,123 photos
32.  #pretty - 27,687,567 photos
33.  #sun - 27,583,417 photos
34.  #food - 27,409,451 photos
35.  #instagramers - 26,197,524 photos
36.  #friends - 26,182,561 photos
37.  #lol - 24,989,254 photos
38.  #hair - 22,859,451 photos
39.  #bored - 21,586,314 photos
40.  #swag - 21,569,900 photos
41.  #cool - 21,370,212 photos
42.  #funny - 20,780,049 photos
43.  #onedirection - 20,410,001 photos
44.  #life - 20,334,119 photos
45.  #nature - 20,266,828 photos
46.  #family - 19,848,462 photos
47.  #christmas - 19,542,006 photos
48.  #my - 18,660,172 photos
49.  #blue - 18,489,451 photos
50.  #pink - 17,953,933 photos
51.  #dog - 17,943,442 photos
52.  #beach - 17,670,037 photos
53.  #art - 17,538,396 photos
54.  #hot - 17,384,494 photos
55.  #tagsforlikes - 17,089,894 photos
56.  #photo - 16,794,388 photos
57.  #amazing - 15,979,281 photos
58.  #repost - 15,893,445 photos
59.  #girls - 15,820,604 photos
60.  #instahub - 15,466,981 photos
61.  #sunset - 15,426,384 photos
62.  #party - 15,419,737 photos
63.  #awesome - 15,292,933 photos
64.  #red - 15,223,775 photos
65.  #baby - 14,963,775 photos
66.  #statigram - 14,813,215 photos
67.  #black - 14,756,443 photos
68.  #versagram - 14,670,529 photos
69.  #cat - 14,587,895 photos
70.  #music - 14,582,697 photos
71.  #instalove - 14,561,589 photos
72.  #likeforlike - 14,451,644 photos
73.  #night - 14,371,566 photos
74.  #followback - 13,602,164 photos
75.  #throwbackthursday - 13,395,605 photos
76.  #clouds - 13,228,789 photos
77.  #white - 12,911,807 photos
78.  #bestfriend - 12,393,864 photos
79.  #yummy - 12,388,898 photos
80.  #yum - 12,280,256 photos
81.  #like4like - 12,151,613 photos
82.  #textgram - 12,025,992 photos
83.  #eyes - 12,014,859 photos
84.  #green - 11,927,125 photos
85.  #2012 - 11,722,646 photos
86.  #sweet - 11,696,715 photos
87.  #all_shots - 11,652,778 photos
88.  #school - 11,642,671 photos
89.  #igaddict - 11,568,790 photos
90.  #style - 11,470,768 photos
91.  #i - 11,304,169 photos
92.  #beauty - 11,016,473 photos
93.  #harrystyles - 11,009,421 photos
94.  #instacollage - 10,942,042 photos
95.  #jj_forum - 10,905,037 photos
96.  #foodporn - 10,647,412 photos
97.  #nice - 10,633,312 photos
98.  #fboy - 10,414,825 photos
99.  #instago - 10,314,053 photos
100.  #best - 10,271,100 photos

What everyone has failed to recognise is that, as popular and as effective as the use of hashtags are, someone who is idly searching the internet for  #boy,  #harrystles,  #lol, #awesome, #onedirection and #cute is most likely to be a 13 year old girl with very little amount of spending power or market influence.   As an experiment I have tagged this article with the top 20 hashtags so we shall see if this has any bearing on it's traffic. 

#haveagreatdayeveryone

 

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