I see a lot of diaries and posts here at Daily Kos and elsewhere around the progressive blogosphere using hashtags in refering to the Occupy Wall Street movement, (i.e. "#ows", "#occupywallstreet"). I understand the purpose of using it on Twitter (to help people find tweets that have to do with OWS), but I don't quite understand why people are using it everywhere else.
If the argument is that it helps people search for content that has to do with OWS not only on Twitter, but everywhere else as well, then we don't we use them for all kinds of other things that we talk about. We don't refer to President Obama as "#PresidentObama" or the Democratic Party as "#DemocraticParty". We seem to be able to find content about most other things in the universe without using hashtags, but all of the sudden, we need them for this particular movement? I suspect that the use of them with respect to OWS has something more to do with branding.
Which brings me to my second question: if it has to do with branding, what are we really promoting? Are we promoting mass protest and civil disobedience against the abuse of power by the richest 1% in our society via the use of hashtags, or are we promoting Twitter? If we are promoting Twitter, aren't we then promoting a private corporation presumably owned by members of that same 1% that we are supposed to protesting against?