I agree leveled hashtags (or indeed ANY hashtag) eventually runs too long for the 140 character approach. What if

One observation: every tweet comes with non user-entered metadata – like from tweetdeck, or twhirl, and date and time.

So the LOCALE should be included as metadata that can be attached from the client used instead of manually attaching it. There’ll be various methods of attaching/determining this metadata:

1. from a desktop: Via IP address or manually setting it from the app/client/tweet site.
2. from mobile devices: GPS coordinates, manual setting from client/app.

There could be a hashtag that could be implemented that’ll attach the location of the tweet as metadata – so that not EVERY tweet comes with location info (which could be potentially lethal in fraud and other criminal terms). So for example “omg the field is on fire #?”, the #? would trigger an attachment of location metadata.

That would raise the question of what to do with news that’s not in a location of your own. Then it’ll be back to the manual attachment method which could still feed into the metatag…

Big questions 🙂

1 – Interesting point about “leveled hashtag approach”.

We could have a more detail classification. Maybe something like the Internet Domain naming system.

#news.contry.province.city (province could be, department, state, depending of the country – in Canada, we have provinces and territories). Ex: #news.ca.qc.qc which means News for Canada, Quebec province and Quebec City or #news.ca.qc.mtl which means: News for Canada, Quebec province and Montreal City.

According to your Twitter profile, you are living in South Africa. Your hashtag could be #news.za.county.cityname.

It is a precise system, but it has a little problem. That’s many characters. We are limited to 140 in Twitter. Is that classification system taking too many characters? Please comment.

2 – I live Outside the 50 states of America. I live in Canada (Quebec City). Which is the country north of the United States. I am a Canadian. My suggestion of hashtag was for users of Twitter without regard of their country. I think your point is good that it could be difficult to have hashtag for all cities without a leveled approach.

– Denis François

Travis, only some of our local news stations are on Twitter (radio, TV, newspapers).

You raise a good question about the size of the City. I think that we will have to try it to see if it is easier on smaller or bigger city.

Thanks for contributing with #newssf for Sioux Falls.

– Denis François