I recently got very annoyed reading my news feed on my Facebook page when I saw a number of people using hashtags in their status updates, it wasn't just one or two people but it was more than I expected to see. It may say something about the Facebook friends I have or the people I know, but let me tell you that is not the case. I choose to use Facebook as an all purpose tool, so Facebook doesn't represent who my real friends are. I went on to Wikipedia and searched 'hashtag'. It was defined as: Hashtags are words or phrases prefixed with the symbol #, a form of metadata tag..., it continued with the very important line, ... the hashtag does not work on Facebook.
So I decided to post it to Facebook just to make my point. In the space of less than an hour, I got 8 likes, 3 comments and 3 shares, with one person admitting they are guilty of using hashtags on Facebook, where it serves no purpose (as many people who use Twitter know). So why do people still do it? Having said that, I read a few interesting articles relating to the hashtag, they included 'The Do's and Don't of Twitter Hashtags'; '#Overused: The Most Popular Twitter Hashtags of 2011' and '8 Things I Hope Are On Twitter's 2012 To-Do List'.

Now that I have that off my chest, the ongoing battle of a free press continues. In Somalia, journalists were detained, barred from traveling and a Gambian journalist is charged with defamation.

In other news, through-the-line communications agency, Chillibush Africa, has launched,The Zimbabwean introduces a 'new look', Howzit MSN expands into Africa, Africa gets its own Spotify called TruSpot and Carole Kimutai interviews Bogonko Bosire, the man behind Jackal News.

PS: If you haven't seen our 2012 Biz Trends section, sponsored by Aegis Media, I suggest you go and read some interesting forecasts.

Evan-Lee Courie (@evan1985)

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