• Don’t take it too seriously. There will never be consensus. Ultimately everything is decided by what people use. Debate about what we should use will just go on and on forever.
• Sometimes the stupidest ideas (sometimes starting as jokes and accidents) turn out to be the most popular and effective. Think of LOLcats (and Twitter itself). Do some research on how the most popular bands got their names.
• Everything is experimental and will eventually become obsolete anyways. Being able to adapt and grow matters a lot more than any particular standard or practice.
• It takes a lot of bad ideas to come up with one good one. What London needs more than anything is to promote a heterogeneous culture that creates and tries new things. Don’t be afraid to run with it and see what happens.
• #ldn is the most intuitive but people in the UK have been calling their city LDN since long before we were. Use it if you like. I’ve used it a few times — not so much for aggregation but to indicate to people that the tweet was my contribution to a conversation about London (in the same way that people use ironic hashtags like “#fail”).
• #ldnont is logically the best but it will never become standard. If there’s a core group committing acts of citizen journalism then maybe they/we can get together and agree on some standards. Personally I think there should be more co-operation in this space — but that challenge goes way beyond the topic of hashtags.
• #yxu is obviously not the most natural or intuitive (or memorable, I’m finding) but it has potential to lead to other, better ideas. It definitely sparked ideas in my mind and I’d encourage anyone to see their thoughts through. Brainstorm, prototype, and see what happens.
• I don’t and will never follow any London hashtag for an extended period because I already follow people from London who are having the conversations I’m interested in, and through those people I find new people (via retweets, mentions, etc) and whichever hashtags people are using for specific events and topics in the city.
• I’d rather invest this energy into making event- or issue-centric hashtags more effective. How can we improve the conversations that naturally occur and elapse around conferences and topics like the LTC strike, etc?
• If people from different social/interest groups use different tags, that’s fine; they’re using Twitter for building their community and that’s what it’s ultimately about. See the academic conversation on the notion that “there is not one ‘public’ but a network of ‘publics’…”
• There is value in #ldn and #ldnont (or whatever) for people who are new to London or Twitter, but that value quickly diminishes as they start building relationships. Our energy would be better spent making a more prominent “home base” (or several) for people to gravitate to and from… and/or ways to dynamically keep track of what specific temporary hashtags mean.
• On second thought, if you want to promote a specific hashtag, go ahead and collaborate with people to start a hub to promote it — just a site or page devoted to aggregating content — and if people keep coming back and want their stuff to show up on your site they’ll use the tag. If people don’t care then the issue is settled [oops, I meant settled "for now"].
• This isn’t a total criticism of the CanTags initiative. That in itself is a welcome experiment which might prove to become a kind of stepping stone to something else — something we wouldn’t have been able to conceive unless CanTags was tried first. It certainly helped move things along in London and got a lot of us on the same page.
• I have to wonder if the CanTags argument for geographic taxonomy will be made redundant by the rapidly proliferating use of location technologies — not to mention the effectiveness of real-time search.
• What’s important is that we’re having open dialogs that anyone can find and add value to. Keep that spirit alive and the rest starts taking care of itself.
