This is how collaborative ideation and innovation works in the age of cognitive surplus.

• On Thursday, Seth Godin backed my official hashtags for books idea after my friend Chris Johnson pinged him about it.
• Throughout that evening and over the weekend, authors and publishers stopped by to tell me that they would be implementing the idea in their current and future projects, and about some of the related efforts that had been tried in the past (see the Twitter stream on the official page of #brandexpedition for a great example).
• Amit made a case for page-by-page hashtags, and I met him half way, arguing that chapter-by-chapter would work better.
• Michael L.wrote a tongue-in-cheek open letter to Jeff Bezos asking for the ability to follow and contribute to book-specific hashtag conversations via Kindle (awesome idea), and AJ Fisher echoed this request on Twitter.
• Michael V. imagined how publishers might benefit by curating these conversations on-site, and adding QR codes to the mix.
• Jim Benson shared his thoughts that the uniqueness and brevity of #pkflow were “instrumental in building community and conversation” around his book Personal Kanban, and that he started using this hashtag while the book was still being written.

And then Aidan built an entire website based on the idea, which I think is the ultimate testimony to the speed of ideation, innovation and implementation that we see today. In his words:

I think this is a great idea and have set up the site http://bookhashtags.com to try and curate a set of “official” hashtags for books.

This should help people to find the hashtags people are recommending for use with a specific book.

The site stores tweets so unlike a Twitter search which only returns the last couple of days of tweets for a hashtag the site will provide a more persistent record of the conversations taking place around a book.

It’s hard to imagine a better response to an idea I sketched out in about an hour. At the risk of being reported for humble bragging, I’m extremely grateful to everyone who picked up the ball and started running with it. Let’s keep working on this together.