The Hashtag

Chances are, if you're reading this, you're the kind of reader that reads stuff about social media fairly often.

That means you've probably had quite an eyeful of Year In Review pieces by now.

You'd know that #egypt was 2011's biggest hashtag, followed by that bizarre #tigerblood thing spawned by a crazed actor who shall remain nameless, 'cause dammit, becoming the fastest tweeter to reach a million followers ever is publicity enough.

You may already have had a chuckle at a 'Top however-many Facetwitter gaffes' piece or three, and taken a moment to ponder the amazing evolution of the medium that saw a man live-tweet the capture of Osama Bin Laden without even realising it.

Being a Netizen, you may have been impressed by Twitter's own Year in Review pages - all nice and cleanly laid out, with a bold yet nuanced colour scheme and some mad  information architecture, breaking 2011 down into hot topics, tweets-per-second on big events and a list of who joined.

(Are there any real-world equivalents to that last list?)

The point is, this blog isn't here to take on big-guns like Mashable, Tech Crunch and the Twitter itself at summing up what's been an inordinately huge year in news.

Suffice to say there were plenty of gruesome and devastating stories from the year that began with a gigantic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan, and they were all told and commented-upon at length online.

Here are a couple of examples of things that may have slipped under the radar but were nonetheless thought- or giggle-provoking.

First prize goes to Princess Beatrice and that hat.

Bea seemingly innocently donned a sort of cross between an octopus and a tacky photo frame and stepped out for the most publicised event in a gazillion years, the royal wedding.

The hat became so popular that it quickly got its own Facebook fan page and then Obama and his team bought it in bulk to wear while watching the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

That's what the Internet said, anyway.

After spreading its beige mirth to so many, the hat was then sold on eBay, earning $130,000 for charity. The Hashtag would like to thank Bea's hat for the good times.

On to the not-so-good. #MenCallMeThings was a saddening but important feed where women could post misogynistic and cruel comments made to them online. Ironically, it attracted its share of trolls, who littered it with nasty posts about women and goaded its participants. Someone also tweeted a link to a chilling article about a study that showed quotes from lad mags and quotes from convicted rapists were often indistinguishable from each other.

Urgh. Enough of that  - and back to fabulous corporate social media strategy fails - or as it should otherwise have been known: pyjamagate.

#QantasLuxury was a strategic attempt by the Airline That Stranded 80,000 Passengers to make itself some friends back by offering 'luxury items' if they played along with its hashtag.

The luxury items turned out to be a pair of pyjamas and a business-class amenities kit, both of which the airline would have lying around in hangar-sized piles. That was not lost on the angry-and-hilarious tweeting public, who hashtagged the crap out of the poor social media (intern?) who thought of it - all the way to a downfall video.

(Apologies for any Bublation or fast food chain ads you may have been subjected to before that video played.)

While Princess Beatrice won Hat of the Year, it was certainly US Congressman Antony Weiner who won the Biggest Twit award.

Perhaps misreading 'public forum' as 'pubic forum', he tweeted pics of his underwear to some female associates much more social-media savvy than he and utterly uninterested in its contents.

YouTube had its moment in the sun as a video of a woman making abusive remarks about immigrants on a UK tram got tens of milions of views and led to her arrest after the police saw tweets about it. It's now been removed but you can Google it if you're very partial to words that begin with F.

Anyway dears, this blog is nearing the deadly 800-word mark, so it's time to wrap up with an extraordinary development that is quite fresh.

Hassidic rapper Matisyahu shocked fans of reggae and Judaism with a twitpic this week, that showed him without his beard. That means he's doing what is known in Hebrew as 'exiting in question' - or dropping his orthodoxy. It doesn't mean he'll stop being Jewish - he certainly won't be racing to order these Christmas decorations made from old motherboards or Angry Birds tree baubles - but it's a huge deal for many of his fans.

If you're still reading, here's a shameless plug. SBS On Demand is now available on XBox. Yes! Our nondenominationalholidayseason gift is some nerdy loving for the gamers among you.

And if you're not a gamer, but you have a computer with Google on it, copy-paste this into a search:

(sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2)

to see what SBS and the Hashtag wish for you in the new year.