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The hashtag (#) symbol provides an easy way to segment and monitor conversations in Twitter. Here’s what hashtag.org says:

Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Here are a few examples of how hashtags are used in Twitter:

• #journchat (twitter.com/journchat) is a weekly chat (Mon 7-10pm CST) among journalists, bloggers and public relations folks. It’s hosted by @PRsarahevans. To participate, users only need to tag their tweets with #journchat.
• #collegejourn (twitter.com/collegejourn) is a weekly chat (Sun 8-11pm EST) with the college journalism community. It’s hosted by @suzanneyada. To participate, users only need to tag their tweets with #collegejourn.
• #advise (twitter.com/advise) is a [monthly] chat (Thursday) between ad students, professionals and professors. It’s hosted by @sbradley3 @gharsha. To participate, users only need to tag their tweets with #advise.

TIP: An easy way to participate in these conversations is to go to http://tweetchat.com/. Log in with your Twitter username and password, enter the room name you wish to enter (i.e. #journchat, #collegejourn, #etc.) and chat away! Tweetchat does the work for you by auto-entering your hashtag so you don’t have to. Even better: your room is isolated so you can continue the conversation without being interrupted by other streams not participating in the chat. *Please keep in mind, all tweets in Tweetchat will continue to show up in your Twitter stream.

• #followfriday (twitter.com/followfriday) is a fun and different way to use hashtags. #followfriday is a weekly event (Fridays) where users tweet the names of Twitter users they like and follow. To participate, users simply tweet the name and tag it with #followfriday.

To keep up with hashtag conversations via RSS, here’s what I do:

1. Go to http://search.twitter.com/
2. Plug in your search terms (i.e. “#socialmediasc”) and click enter.
3. Copy the URL: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23socialmediasc
4. Head to Google Reader (or whatever you use as your RSS Reader)
5. Click “Add a Subscription”, paste in the URL, and you’re done.

Related: An interesting question was raised on Facebook, and I don’t know the answer: Is there a clear and fast rule for how often to use hashtags?

Anyone care to take a stab?