I’ve just been re-reading The Emerging Viewertariat: Explaining Twitter Responses to Nick Griffin’s Appearance on BBC Question Time by
Nick Anstead & Ben O’Loughlin. If you’re interested at all in TV and the ever popular trend to liveblog it, it’s worth a read.
“In all, 45.24 per cent of our tweets featured the #bbcqt tag. However, by implication, this also means that the majority of tweets related to the programme were not tagged in this way. An important research question for future studies of the relationship between live television and real time commentary will be to understand how these two groups – hashtaggers and non-hashtaggers – differ from each other. We might hypothesize that the former group are more versed in the etiquette of micro-blogging and thus constitute an elite group, who comment more frequently and are more likely to engage in programme related conversation, while the latter are more casual users, posting less and with lower levels of interaction.”
- How popular is the tag? The more popular the tag, the more likely it is to trigger spam @ replies (this is why I never tweet “xfactor” or “ipad” – instead I use incorrect names that will give the gist “pop idol” or “eye pad”).
- If the majority of my Twitter stream is talking about the same thing, I have no need to tag the content (though if I did tag it, that might help the minority to understand what I’m talking about.
- If I want people who don’t follow me but who are using the tag to see my comment, then I will put the tag on it so that I join the wider conversation.
- Some people who I quite like really really hate people that live blog telly and have a silly arbitrary rule about unfollowing or blocking folk who would dare do something as low brow as watch TV. Really that should make me hate them more than they hate me, but they’re OK really. I figure a few loose tweets that aren’t hashtagged to buggery will fly under their radar. Maybe.