Part of lecture for J 349T Writing for Online Publication, in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. (See writingforonline.wordpress.com or sethlewis.org)
Some examples: #ona09 (vs. #ONA) #iranelection (vs. #iran) #snowleopard vs. “snow leopard” The key: these are organic tagging systems (folksonomies vs. taxonomies)
— What’s different: The media good at creating groups are no good at conversation, and vice versa – that was 20 th century; today, the Web is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time—not the one-to-one of phones, nor the one-to-many of newspapers and broadcast, but a many-to-many pattern. — Watch Shirky from 5:38 to 12:25