Taken as a whole, Twitter can seem like one gigantic mass of everyday tedium (“Eating cheese again, yum!”), TMI (“I’m having sex. Right. Now!), and occasionally useful snippets of information (“THere was just a giant earthquake in China!”). But just as bloggers have taken to tagging their posts to make work on a particular topic easily found (look at the bottom of each post on this site, for example — you have to be on the post page to see them, not on the front page of thesite), Twitterers have developed a system of tagging for tweets to help make it easier to find tweets on a specific subject.

Because space is limited and there’s no built-in space to add tags, Tweeters mark their tags with hashtags (#) to differentiate them from the body of the tweet, like this: #twitter. Searching for #twitter (with the hashtag) at search.twitter.com will bring up all the tweets from across the Twitter system that people have marked as being about Twitter.

This makes Twitter a unique and quite useful research tool. You can find out what people are saying about a subject, and who you should be listening to if you’re interested in a particular topic. Most tech events agree on a Twitter tag so that attendees can pool their impressions of various panels, discussions, and the event in general. You can also see what’s hot by looking at the “trending” topics on the Twitter Search homepage, or for a more thorough look at today’s how topics on Twitter check out TweetStats.

To improve the findability of your own tweets, and to reach out to the community of writers who might be interested in what you have to say on Twitter, use tags wherever possible, For questions and comments about writing, use #writing; for tweets about editing, use #editing. The more you use hashtags to tag your tweets, the more useful the service as awhole will be — and by agreeing to use standards like #writing and #editing we can all contribute to the great community of writers on the Internet.