Social Media Know-How: Twitter - How to use #hashtags

Welcome to the first installment of my "Social Media Know-How" Series!  Since not many people compeletely understand hashtags, I figured this would be a great place to start...

What are Hashtags?
Hashtags are a community-driven convention employed by Twitter users to add additional context and metadata to their tweets.  Wondering what that means in English?  Hashtags are just like the tags you would use in a blog to label posts or on Flickrto label an image.  The only difference is, on Twitter, hashtags are added inline to the post.

Hashtags were created to develop groupings on Twitter, which offers only  the most basic of functions (140 characters of text).  Hashtags came about due to the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag 3sandiegofire to denote his updates on the disaster.  Since then, the use of hashtags has become commonplace on Twitter.  They are searchable within Twitter's search engine and hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of these tags.

How to Construct a Hashtag
This is easy, just prefix a word or string of words with a hash symbol: #hashtag.  It may be helpful to search your key words to find out if there is already an established hashtag for what you want to tweet about.  These tags are very useful to present and search for information on Twitter, but don't go overboard.  Even though #twitter is a common hashtag, no one wants to come across your tweet that merely states "I love #twitter!"