TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Sean Sperte wrote a short, but very good, piece on hashtags. Here’s one part that stuck out to me:

Hashtags do have great potential. Even in their most basic form – for taxonomy – hashtags can trump inferral through machines. No one knows better what they’re saying than the person saying it.

So, so right. One of Cheddar’s features that seemed immediately obvious to me after seeing it, but had never even entered my mind beforehand, was categorizing tasks using hashtags within the task itself. Then, to see tasks with a certain hashtag, you just tap one of the hashtags. It’s instant categorization that somehow feels both quicker and more natural than managing a categories list and choosing one from a drop-down menu.

That’s one small example, but Sean’s right that it could provide much more accurate taxonomy for virtually all forms of text (or anything, really) with very little effort from users themselves.