I remember a time, not to long ago, when entering a pound sign meant sending my pager message off to a friend. Oh, the good old days when a “pound-pound” meant giving a fist-bump not throwing a double hashtag on the end of my Tweet.  I’ve been on Twitter for quite a while now, and it’s been interesting to see the progression of the hashtag and how it’s evolved along with Twitter.  It wasn’t until the Chile earthquake a couple weeks ago that I really saw the impact of hashtags and the benefit it can serve.

For me, when a technology shows up on high-trafficked websites like it did on CNN after the earthquake, it really means that the it has “arrived”.  In  this case, it was the hashtag, a useful way to designate a category or way to flag a tweet you post on twitter.  As I woke up early this morning to the gentle back-and-forth of my house and a screaming daughter, I grabbed the laptop and checked my two go-to sites, USGS and Twitscoop.  Usually the USGS is pretty quick about getting earthquake data up, but nothing is faster than the good old hashtag, and seeing the giant #earthquake prominently displayed in the center of the page letting me know I wasn’t alone in feeling it.

Obviously, there has been quite a bit of seismic activity happening around the globe as of late.  After the Chilean earthquake, we decided to start putting an emergency preparedness kit together and it also got me thinking about communication after an earthquake.  Recently, I’ve started to see more county services pop-up on Twitter providing information on disaster related topics, where to go, what issues are out there, but unfortunately, there are so many and it can be cumbersome to find them.  So I had an idea… what if we could centralize them into one location?

My socially conscience project is going to build up a site that houses all emergency services and displays tweets during emergencies.  I’m going to start with Los Angeles county and work my way up from there.  I’ve registered the domain names tweetmergency.com and tweetemergency.com and I plan on using these domains as the foundation for the idea.  I don’t plan on making any money from this, just simply offer the online community a way to access critical emergency information when it’s needed most.  Now I just need to find the time to build it!

Tags: earthquake, hashtag, tweetmergency