Back in March, just after this blog first started, John posted about the #haiku hashtag on Twitter. For those who missed that post or are new here and still aren't familiar with the insider terminology of the popular microblogging and chat site, a hashtag is a crude form of metadata by which Twitter users tag tweets with a topic. Those searching for such a topic can then easily find the tweet marked with that hashtag. For example, those who wish to read the steady stream of haiku poetry being produced on Twitter can run a search algorithm including the "#haiku" hashtag, and all the tweets marked with it will come up in that reader's search results.
Haiku isn't the only literary format suited to the 140 characters that Twitter has set as its limit. Recently, I've begun following other users who are quite adept at a similar Japanese form of poetry known as tanka.
