There has been concerted, and probably justifiable mockery of my phrase “hashtag taxonomy” coined in this post from yesterday. And it also didn’t help to find that somehow we promoted a subtly different version of the tag from the original suggestion – tags, after all, work best when they are consistent.

But despite these teething troubles, the idea has caught on with a key handful of twitterers who are now helpfully labelling their tweets with the phrase #LibDem08

I sense an entire audience out there on the edges of your seats earnestly waiting for an explanation of how this is at all useful to man or beast.

It’s helpful because you can use another service to bring all the mini twitter updates that use the hashtag together on one page. One such service can be found here.

It does have its limitations. Only those with public tweets are included, for starters, so there are a few either shy or safety-conscious twitterers whose updates you cannot see unless they give you permission. A further limitation is that the few people doing it are hardly representative of the thousands of Lib Dems thronging the halls around us.

But for all that, it’s an interesting snapshot into the lives of conferees – and one more thing we didn’t have last year.