Uh oh, looks like there was a pretty strong feeling, but medium-sized earthquake up North.  I didn’t have Twitter open this evening but Doc Searls’ post about it popped up in my feed reader about 10:00 pm or so.  Doc links to Chris Messina’s post about using hashtags¹ to track posts around breaking news or an unfolding topic.

Following the principle of DRY, this simple design means that you can get more mileage out of your 140 characters than you might otherwise if you had to specify your tags separately or in addition to your content.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Hashtags become all the more useful now that Twitter supports the “track” feature. By simply sending ‘track [keyword]‘ to Twitter by IM or SMS, you’ll get real-time updates from across the Twitterverse. It’s actually super useful and highly informative.

Since I joined Twitter for the value it brings to communication in a disaster, things like this really interest me.  This is a terrific application of tags and Twitter and one I’m definitely going to start using.

I’m now following the keyword “earthquake” on Twitter and wishing my northern counterparts safety and no more shaking tonight.  It sounds like it felt bad, but basically shook stuff down from shelves and the like.  That’s a relief.  

Keywords I’m tracking on Twitter: fire, wildfire, earthquake, landslide .  Why landslide?  Because that’s what is going to happen when it rains here.

¹Hashtags: Keywords preceded by the #. So hashtags in a tweet look like this: #earthquake northern california 5.6 shaken, not stirred

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Tags: twitter, disaster, earthquake, fire, disaster response