JeffreyBarke.net

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.

From http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags. Thanks for turning me on to hashtags, Maz!

Google I/O '08 Keynote by Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer has been with Google for nine years, helping to build Google into one of the world's most popular web services. As the VP of Search and User Experience, her team is behind some of Google's most popular and successful products including core web search, images, news, books, maps, iGoogle, toolbar, desktop and health. This talk is a glimpse from inside the trenches of how Google builds products (including practical insights on how to build the best products), how to prioritize your efforts especially under resource constraints and how to think about strategy.

Source: YouTube

I created a tutorial that will step one through how to create a density map with Prototype, the Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI. The final product, a density map of liquor licenses in Milwaukee, WI, is below. While this map is based on real data, one limitation of the free HeatMapAPI is that only 100 data points can be submitted per call. Since there are approximately 1,300 liquor licenses in Milwaukee, this map isn't even close to accurate!

Creating a map like this takes four simple steps:

1. Getting everything ready
2. Create the Google map
3. Add the data
4. Create the density map

To step one!

I love posting "cheat sheets" around the office, and here are the two latest additions to my wall:

• jQuery 1.2
• SEO (pdf format)

Thanks for sending me these links, Christy Gurga!