What's that sound?  Ahh... it's the sound of dust settling down on this
discussion...

OKAY... so let's see  There are HASHTAGS and there are CRYPTOGRAPHIC
HASHTAGS and they serve different purposes.

As some have said, hashtags can be quite useful for electronic assets with
long term retention requirements as part of a digital preservation strategy.
For one thing, when you periodically migrate content form media to media to
avoid degradation or obsolescence, you can use the hashtag to perform a
checksum verification that all of the content that was on the original media
has been transferred to the new media.

No experience using them as an indexing tool though.

As for cryptographic hashtags, yeah we do that- they're 'part and parcel' of
the movement of all classified information assets and incorporated in all
cyber security initiatives.

My concern with a rampant use of hashtags though is something we haven't
discussed here for a long time... the loss of the "Keys to the Kingdom" if
whoever sets them up disappears. Similar to what happened in San Francisco
in 2008 http://goo.gl/vm2tO if the person who established the hash doesn't
maintain them and pass them along, content can be locked away forever.

And I'm not speaking of hashtag use as in Twitter (where you create a
searchable term in messages, i.e. #cheeseburger ) I'm talking about hashtags
used in databases, unstructured files, appended to structured files, etc. if
the 'tagged term' comes form some folksonomy or other non-universal stream
of information OR if it's ambiguous (orange for example can be a fruit, a
city or county, or a color) then it becomes less useful.

Sexy? please... even LESS sexy than garp or 'information certified'  !!  =)

Larry
-- 
*Lawrence J. Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972*

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