In order for the MCS community to take better advantage of Twitter, we should have a hashtag to brand our messages. I have put out the tag "#ChemSensitivity" for all MCS-related tweets. By inserting this tag into each tweet, we can search all of Twitter for messages related to Multiple Chemical Sensitivities.
Here is an example from @ourtoxictimes of what this looks like:
#ChemSensitivity
(Misspelling alert! I meant HASHTAG not hahtag. Typing, another of my weaknesses. -J)
Hashtags in Twitter are a way for all writers to index their own messages without needing any central authority to be involved. It also allows a person to index a message for numerous subjects. However, Twitter etiquette says no more than 2 tags per message. I've seen tweets that are nothing but hashtags, and they become nearly meaningless.
We at CIIN are pretty new and inexperienced with Twitter, so we are not a source of help in making it work, but there are many sites with help already out there, and Twitter itself has pretty good help, I think.
A lot of MCSers do not or cannot use computers, but many of us can. Twitter and the blogs are places we can connect and pass on information, ideas and support if we just learn or start to use these social networking sources.
