The team at Microblink has been an active user of Yammer since they won the TechCrunch 50 last summer. We hold group discussions, share interesting links and post idle thoughts or ideas we have during the day.

What the Hashtag is our first real project as a result of Microblink and things have been moving along fairly steadily. Right now we are in the midst of another design update to the interface and also looking at adding more organization to the site.

In talking about how to organize the hashtags on our site, we ended up getting into a battle over whether or not hashtags could be organized at all, given their unorganized and haphazard manner.

Check out the unedited, unfiltered stream between Rob and I on Yammer below.

Mike: I built out a few categories last night. Here is one. http://wthashtag.com/Category:Social_Media_Breakfast Would like to discuss how we can improve the look of these pages. Possibly redoing page titles, structure, etc. Needs a little lift.

Rob: i would like to revisit our use of categories but I don’t consider these categories at all…

Mike: While they may not be “categories,” I think creating groupings like this are key to content discovery. Unless we had a reco engine to determine what hashtags are similar, this is about all we’ve got.

Rob: I think of categories as being fixed and what you have as being groups of related hashtags by a topic. in my mind categories describe how the hashtag is being used: is it used as meta data to a tweet, to identify a group, to identify an event, etc

Mike: I think we need to find a way to create several overarching categories: memes, groups, events, meta, AND then filter these other items under those main headers.

Rob: lets model something before we build it on the site then… I agree with groupings to help with discovery but that is what I thought related hashtags were…

Mike: The problem is that related hashtags are manual. Too much work to go to each SMC page and list all the hashtags that are also SMC-related. What happens when a new hashtag is added? Go back and update all those pages?

Rob: that is why you model it to build a solution. we can automate this and define a hierarchy but we need to come to a conclussion on what that is

Mike: The automation is the part I am questioning. Theoretically we could build something that would determine where things go, but I think it will largely depend on users and moderation.

Rob: solving this issue would be interesting to see if we can find the x degress of separation for hashtags…. i’m just saying lets thinking about it and flush out an idea

Mike: I think related hashtags should be for hashtags that are directly related, not two different Social Media Breakfast hashtags. Related is determined by user.

Mike: I think our original idea on categories makes sense, but these other areas (NFL, PRSA, etc.) will fall as subcategories. Take a look at how Mahalo structures their stuff.

Rob: so lets put that into a realistic example:1) dmtweetup has related hashtag dmlunchup. 2) is triangletweetup related to dmtweetup or grouped ?

Mike: triangletweetup is grouped with dmtweetup. They are tweetups. dmlunchup is a related tag because it involves the same people/area

Rob: so we have never communicated that before to whoever is our user community and even as microblink we haven’t really gone into that discussion…. good conversation to have so before we build anymore pages lets make sure this is doing what we want and Mark may be able to go in with some code wizardry to help take the work off

Rob: what I think and i think you are saying is there is category (which defines use) which contains groups, uber-hashtags, or maybe just tags which contains hashtags, which can have related hashtags within that tag or uber-hashtage/group… thoughts?

Rob: another thought…. and i know i’m using terms incorrectly but related hashtags is more of a recursive hashtag in which it defines the same group of the hashtag it is related to….

Mike: If a category is Sports, there may be subcategories for Hockey, Football and Baseball, and inside that NHL, NFL, MLB. For a hashtag (#pens ), it would be placed in categories for Hockey, NHL. Related hashtags may include #letsgopens , #penguins . Categories define what a hashtag is grouped with by usage/topic, while related hashtags represent closely related hashtags referring to same or similar subject.

Mike: #ocu2009 is placed in Events category, while #octribe is placed in Groups category, though they are marked as related hashtags on both pages because #octribe was formed at the #ocu2009 event.

Rob: lets talk more about this but i think there is even a larger category than groups… i think hashtags have grown in use that they can no longer be considered just metadata of a tweet. in my mind your example would be cat: meta, grouping: sports, hashtag: #pens, related: #letsgopens, #penguins

Rob: i think the ocu example just killed me… and if creating group pages works and we drop categories as I define that is fine. my main interest is pointing out many users are starting to use hashtags like @replies and that was one of my earlier drivers for this idea… hashtags need a profile page too… thus coming up with meta (traditional use) vs groups, events, chats (which is really a group now) etc

Mike: I think the main goal is in helping people discover what they are looking for. We can’t really define overarching categories to stuff things into. We just have to group things together in ways that are logical so that people can find them. Trying to force something as meta (which I’m not sure what that means anymore – any hashtag could be considered additional context for a tweet) seems like more work than it is worth.

Rob: yeah maybe I’m trying to hard but I think there is some overarching undefined/unconscience use of hashtags that I have been trying to figure out… I by no means want to force categories but would rather discover it and wake people up to this is how you are using them and should we address that/improve

Rob: at any rate I’m fine with the pages however we will have to sort it out eventually before the category list grows too large and out of control… see startup weekend and tweetups. i would kindly suggest these were events and groups respectively before this discussion and all other like use was related…. now that decision is probably above my paygrade

Mike: I think I understand where you are going, but also don’t think we can really shape or adjust how people are using them. My thoughts would be to gather the data, group related/similar items and help people find more of the same. Then we can use the blog to highlight different “use cases.”

Mike: Startup Weekend and Tweetups are marked as Events and Groups respectively, but if I want to know about specific other SW events, I am not going to sort through the main Events category. Just show me a grouping of SW events. Same for tweetups. Related hashtags come into play if you wanted to say that #kcsw was related to #hm1 , based on the fact that they cover similar content and were attended/hosted by similar people in the same place.

Rob: yeah I’m not sold on that approach for me… at any rate it is not core to what I think our business will be so i’m not too worried about it. its a wiki so i’ll let the community sort it out…. on a side note this discussion would have made for an awesome podcast in my mind

Mike: We can still record something. :)

Mike: What is it about the approach that you don’t like? Just trying to understand. This is good stuff to discuss in my mind. ;)

Rob: I’m still figuring that out… keyword search (@mark can we do google search for this) and from the main page Hashtag Categories with Social Media Breakfast being displayed is kind of a turn off. I still can’t get over that their is some sort of order to them and maybe a single page with an explorer like view would make things easier for me… still kicking around right now

Mike: Right now the Hashtag Categories is just display items at random. We could set this to show Groups | Events | Chats etc. if we wanted. Mahalo does this but to an even larger extent. I also think that a discovery type of scenario needs to be explored. If I don’t know what hashtag I am looking for but am interested in a topic, how do I search for that?

I hope you enjoyed reading through our discussion. What do you think about organizing hashtags? Is there a way to make sense of it all? How do you help people discover the hashtags they are interested in participating in or following? Let us know in the comments.