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Page history last edited by geoperdis 14 years, 11 months ago

Logo design by Rob Holowka

 

News

 

CanTags.ca launced officially across Canada on May 1, 2009, in conjunction with LocalDay, a global Twitter event organized by E-Democracy.Org Read all about LocalDay Around the World.

 

 

Five Things You Can Do With CanTags

 

1. Tweet a Hello World add the first three characters of your Postal Code (FSA) preceded by a hash mark e.g. #M5E. Be sure to also include the #CanTags hashtags so that your tweet will show up on that channels.

 

2. Blog, tweet, flickr or youtube a clip sharing your take on what CanTags are and how you plan to use them. Again, be sure to add at least the #CanTags hashtag to your post so that your message shows up on that channel.

 

3. Tell your friends, family, colleagues, coworkers about CanTags and what they can do with them.

 

4. Become a supporter of CanTags.ca and contribute to this website by requesting access the the workspace.

 

5. Read and comment on The Code We Need article by Wayne MacPhail

 

 


 

Please Note 

 

We are having some difficulties with editing on this website depending on how it is accessed at cantags.ca or cantags.pbworks.ca so we may be moving the site to another publishing service. In the meanwhile please add your comments and suggestions as comments below the appropriate pages.

 

 


 

 

CanTags: The Canada Tags Project

 

Local will become a seven-letter word on May 1, 2009.

 

Social media is great for discovering our world and connecting the globe. Locally? That's a little bit trickier.

 

CanTags wants to change that. Seven little letters can be used to share your news with your neighbours, and everyone else. The concept is easier than you think.

 

The first part of the CanTag are (usually) the first three letters of your city or town: e.g. VAN for Vancouver.

 

Then, add the topic under discussion in three or four addition letters: ARTS, BIZ, SPO, etc. The evolving list of proposed CanTags can be found on this Wiki.

 

The first three letters of a Canadian Postal Code (known as the FSA - Forward Sortation Area) can also be used to create CanTags that identify blog posts, photos and tweets down to the neighborhood level.

 

For example a tweet with a #V6ZARTS CanTag indicates that it's about an arts event taking place at the Vancouver Arts Gallery.

 

Twitter has already established the ideal way to access CanTags: a #hashtag before the code (i.e. #VANARTS) will make it more searchable.

 

With the addition of tags, whether it's an essay-length blog post or a 140-character comment, your ideas will be able eventually reach everyone interested in the conversation.

 

 


 

 

What are hashtags?

 

From the Twitter Fan Wiki:

 

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku's channels

hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags. Opt-in by following @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.  Similarly, Twemes offers real-time tracking without the necessity of following a specific Twitter account.  Also, with their purchase of Summize, Twitter itself now offers some support of hashtags at their search engine: http://search.twitter.com

 


 

How you can help define CanTags

 

Twitterers can direct their input with @CanTags and adding the #CanTags tag to the tweet allows everyone else to see it as well. You can also comment on the website pages by requesting access to the site.

 

You can also email the guide's editor, at cantags[@]mediaworks.ca (remove the square brackets beside the @ first).

 

If you'd like to help edit or expand this guide, please contact @geoperdis on Twitter, or by email. He's easy in that way.

 


 

Who came up with this?

 

Toronto mediamaker Geo Perdis (@geoperdis) was looking for a better way to search for Toronto news on Twitter, and came across this post on the Xark blog.

 

A group of people, representing online services in Charleston, SC, came up with a set of hashtags to make it easier to share and find news about their city on Twitter.

 

Can it work across Canada? We're going to give it our best shot, with your help.

 

The project has met with enthusiasm from the likes of new media journalism pioneer Wayne MacPhail (@wmacphail) and author/blogger/journalist Craig Silverman (@craigsilverman).

 

Comments (9)

Wayne MacPhail said

at 2:35 pm on Apr 13, 2009

I suggest a theme of "On May 1 Local will become a six letter word" to introduce Cantags. Copy could read

On May 1, local will become a six letter word
Social media's great for discovering our world and connecting globally. But locally? That's a little harder. Until today. Introducing cantags, a six-letter way to share your local news with your neighbours, and the world. Cantags are easy to use and remember. The first three letters of your city or town? That's the first part of the cantag (HAM for Hamilton). Then, you add the topic you're discussing (ART for the Arts) etc. You can find an evolving list here [link]. To use the cantags on Twitter, just make a hashtag by adding a #, so #HAMART. Six easy letters turn your post, content or comments into a local resource, and you into a local hero. Thanks for using cantags.

Or, something like that.

geoperdis said

at 3:32 pm on Apr 13, 2009

Great suggestion for a CanTags slogan and description Wayne. Thanks very much for taking the time.

One thing about the letter count. The hash tags convention, as it's evolves here and elsewhere, calls for up to seven characters plus the # mark, for a total of eight characters max. Six or five character tags will likely be the exception rather than the rule.

Not to miss the forest for the trees here, but I am wondering if the slogan should say "On May 1, local will become a seven letter word". Also the current convention for Arts & Entertainment is ARTS, so based on that the Hamilton hash tag for A&E would be #HAMARTS.

Thoughts?

Wayne MacPhail said

at 4:03 pm on Apr 13, 2009

That works just fine.

britl said

at 1:45 pm on Apr 24, 2009

Why take a branding that's already known and change it?

In our city, Edmonton, we've been using the airport code #yeg for our International airport. #yeg denotes that it's about the city and is already widely known and accepted in our twitter community. #yyc for Calgary, #yvr for Vancouver and #ywg for Winnipeg are already used frequently and known. If you've got a branding, and it works... why bother changing it? Why confuse and potentially separate the community over something as stupid as a hashtag? Don't change what ain't broken.

As an added note... We in Edmonton can't really use #edm as it's already a hashtag for Electronic Dance Music. So, I think we'll stick with #yeg.

geoperdis said

at 5:27 pm on Apr 24, 2009

Hi Britl, there is no attempt to confuse or split any sort of community over hashtags.

I first floated the CanTags idea on Twitter as YYZTAGS and only later did it turn int TORTAGS. Heard from people all across the country through Twitter and support for 3-letter city abbrev. was greater, about 5:1 ratio.

In any case, no reason for Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg not to continue to use airport-code hashtags if they're popular, while adding CANTAGS as well.

Is there a reference web page or site that you know of that shows what topic codes are used in conjunction with the airport codes? There may be some abbreviations there that could be useful to add to the CanTags topics list.

cgy said

at 2:55 pm on Apr 27, 2009

CGY is already taken up by the hockey, football and lacrosse spam.. its just too much of a mess to follow, leave it to the flames/sports fans is probably the best thing to do with it, using #cgy just confuses the sports fans already following it for hockey reasons. But I do like the idea of adding extra letters to YYC, we talked about this once in YYC i think, back in the fall.

Greg Fowler said

at 3:35 pm on Apr 29, 2009

It looks to me like you're rushing this out of the gate way too fast. To begin with you made the wiki "read only" which fills me with misgivings. I'm happy to see that's been changed, but where's the documentation about a proposed management structure? Do you intend to continue to make all the decisions? I need some answers before I'm going to buy into this.

CanTags Admin said

at 10:07 am on Apr 30, 2009

Hi Greg, thanks for checking in.

The CanTags idea started with a riff on Twitter about using hashtags for news about a month ago. I thought that only a few mediamakers like myself would be interested in kicking the idea around. But I was surprised by the immediate response and uptake by a much wider range of people, especially pro journalists. So we've been moving things along at a fast clip, but that is the beauty of using real-time feedback and online collaboration channels like Twitter and PBWorks. Setting May 1 as a launch date seems like a good idea since it's also the date of the first LocalDay.

The wiki or online guide as we prefer to call it, is not read only, anyone can request an account to join in the discussion. Over time, people will take on different roles as CanTags evolves.

With respect to documentation about a management structure, there isn't anything of the sort at the moment. CanTags is not a formal organization but rather an ad-hoc gathering of interested individuals, taking advantage of the lightweight collaboration tools and online infrastructure to gather, converse and help shape a convention that may prove useful and enduring. Or something better may spring up or follow this initiative so why get bogged down in administrivia at the moment, when we're not even sure that CanTags will take?

As for making decisions, it's actually a group effort. There is a constant and ongoing discussion about what decisions need to be made at what point. And we're happy to have you and anyone else who's interested join that discussion and help evolve CanTags.

I hope I've provided some useful answers to our questions. If not please continue to let us know your thoughts and ideas of how to make CanTags better.

Best,

geo

Bill Deys said

at 3:34 pm on May 1, 2009

I'd like to see something set up for people to add event tags.

Example, we've been holding a Social Media MeetUp in London, it's been referred to as the London Geek Dinner and as such we've been using the tag #gdldn. We've got np problem flipping it to #ldngd to follow the standard if others are going to be on board.

Not sure if it should be a separate event section that lists the all or not but...

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