Wait, come back! It’s me, Helen, and I’m not going to blind you with science – just give you a guide to the craze that swept this year’s Liberal Democrat Conference. Or at least among its Twitter users. By the final day of Conference it had gained national media coverage. Because I slipped it into an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live!

It’s pretty simple: Twitter is a micro-blogging service which lets users send each other text-message-length updates. This can be done by sending an SMS to Twitter, or by logging on to www.twitter.com and posting there. Then your friends can follow them on the website, and in some countries (but no longer in the UK) receive a text containing your latest offering.

These short posts are known as ‘tweets’ and the overall effect is like being surrounded by birdsong; various voices calling back and forth. Bursts of communication that let others know, ‘I’m here.’

No sooner was Conference underway than the Lib Dem Voice office, that petri dish of political punditry, was culturing a great new term: ‘hashtag taxonomy.’ This just means that you can include a short label (tag) in your tweet, prefixed with a ‘#’ symbol (hash). Then messages with the same ‘hashtag’ can be grouped together, for readers who are interested in a particular subject or event.

The one we used at the Lib Dem Conference in Bournemouth was #LibDem08. Updates bearing that hashtag appeared together here on twemes.com. And there you have it, all the Conference-related tweets in one handy digest.

Alex Foster reported here on LDV the success of Twitter and the usefulness of hashtags, as well as on his own blog. He’s rightly proud because it was he who brought this new term to our attention.

The next step was to release it into the wild. Our LDV colleague Mark Pack was first to take it outside the laboratory. He hoped to mention “hashtag taxonomies” on TV, but did not get the chance.

Then it was my turn. Egged on by the others in the Lib Dem Voice bunker, I set off for my interview on BBC Radio 5 Live knowing that I must shoehorn it in somehow. In the event, I was asked a question on how widespread I thought the appeal of the Lib Dems could be. I highlighted our party’s varied use of communications technology, giving www.libdemvoice.org, Twitter and, of course, hashtag taxonomies as examples.

Right-wing journalist Matthew Parris, also on the panel with me, feared Twitter might be ‘dangerous’ while the other panellists looked slightly bemused. But I knew my mission had been successful – as evidenced by this tweet, spotted by Alex shortly afterwards.

And of course, during the radio show, I tweeted about it too.