First a quick introduction. I’m Pat Stark, and I do some collaborative work with Robert Bacal on the web. You’ll see me posting here and there, particularly when Robert is away or otherwise engaged. Robert asked me to do some work on using a hashtag so people interested in training and development, and using twitter, could find each other, and see each other’s posts.

A hash tag is a fancy term for a short “tag” that you put in your tweets, that identifies its content, and can be found using the twitter search function. It begins with a number sign # and is followed by a short set of letters.

So, let’s say we set up a hashtag to identify a tweet as having to do with training or development. Let’s call it #trdev.

When you send a tweet of interest to that community you simply ad #trdev into the tweet. Then, if anyone wants to find all the tweets about the topic all the need to do is search for #trdev.

So, that’s what we will do. If you post on relevant topics, include #trdev in the tweet. And to find people tweeting on the subject, search for #trdev.

These tags can be used to set up regular “meetings” via twitter, and may have some other functions. Stay tuned for more information, or, of course you can search for the hash tag on twitter.

A final note: Clearly if people include #trdev on posts NOT relevant to the topics, the tag becomes useless. Please do not do that, and lets hope that mean, unpleasant people who don’t want such a community to flourish will play nice, and not sabotage the effort.