TagBag

I conceptualized TagBag from what I saw during and after the big Japan earthquake: the latest news, often unbiased, and urgent please, were all over Twitter.  Those affected were soon tracking the best amateur sources of news and pleas for housing, water, etc. via Twitter.  We were not all tracking each other as followers in Twitter, and while that would take time, but we could easily and immediately track #hashtags.  What I saw was that people did not know what tag to use – and would often try to fit two and three hashtags, such as #loveforjapan, #savejapan, #jpquake, #japanearthquake, and #prayforjapan – in hopes that we were following one or more of these.  A little research told me that actually, the most used was #jpquake, and I stuck with this tag when I had something related to the aftershocks, the flooded region, the Fukushima nuclear reactor, thousands of people stranded without food, clothing etc., to share.  When we had something big to share about what was happening, or how to help, we wanted our tweets to be seen; we yearned to know what hashtags the most people were following.

I thought, what about a Twitter tool into which you could enter a term, and learn if that term was being used in the last month – and what’s more, what related terms were tagged, how many times (how many tweets using the tag), and then, add options to show related tweets, users, images, and more – based on the word provided?

Concept by me, coding by Jonathan Waller, the first iteration of TagBag?

Actually, when I have clicked “Related tweets,” “Realted #tags,” “Related images,” etc., here are the results TagBag produces, and you will see that – as I discovered long ago – #jpquake was used the most in the last thirty days.  It is still the most used hashtag used with a tweet mentioning the big Japan quake.

Note that “Related URLs” is not working well, and that “Related @users” provides up to fifteen results, for now.  TagBag is a work in progress, and while we juggle other projects, we’ll let you know when its functions produce even more useful results.

On a happier note, while you cannot save Bags yet, you can move them around, close unnecasary ones, and leave open several, from different searches, on the same screen.

Here are the bags opened from results for “jpquake”: