Day 297

So I've noticed that the career of the hashtag closely parallels that of Britney Spears.

She grew up in a nothing-special town in Mississippi. The hashtag grew up on countless telephone handsets next door to zero. Both were largely overlooked as anything significant at the time.
While Ms Spears was presented with a record deal on the cusp of superstardom, the hashtag had already made its debut appearance on numerous automated telephone systems, urging people to punctuate their touch-tone interactivity while paying for gas (not that anybody will be doing that anymore), and booking seats at cinemas.
Soon, Britney Spears became a household name and there seemed to be no limit to the hits she was mass producing - she was world famous.
The hashtag shot to fame from a cult status thanks to users of Twitter, the developers of which promoted the symbol from unofficial to official search-reference status. The hashtag was also now world famous.
Inevitably, people began to take advantage of Miss Spears resulting in her making some questionable decisions about her song choices, her appearance and her stance on beating stationery vehicles with umbrellas. Similarly, the hashtag was also exploited by the masses and crossed to the darkside where it struck a deal with Facebook as an official search parameter. And probably smacked a horse with a golf club.

Both are now somewhat jaded. Spears hopefully realises that anything she contributes to the music industry now will just be another jog around the same block, prolonging the life support of her bank account, while the hashtag is aware that sticking itself ahead of keywords for ease of future reference is mostly redundant and in some cases considered patronising, in light of misappropriated use by way of #placing #a #hashtag #before #every #damn #word.

In fact, that is the very topic of Day 297's T-shirt donation from Victoria at Berlin based T-shirt retailer Spreadshirt. The frantic design scrutinises the over zealous use of hashtagging by saturating the chest of this garment in a hashtag-happy (well actually, unhappy) rant.

This is just one of thousands of T-shirts available from Spreadshirt created by a dedicated community of designers (the designer of this tee was Kings Never Fall Back).

See more from Spreadshirt via their Twitter account

#BritneySpears