What the Hashtag?! RootsTech Version

The upcoming RootsTech conference is beginning to get blogged & tweeted about quite a bit.  Official RootsTech bloggers have been announced and I’m looking forward to following along in the conversation.   However, what do I do when I have to work all day and can’t follow along the Twitter feed like I hope? I use WhattheHashTag?!.
The site is nice because it allows you to visualize the Twitter activity around the use of any hashtag.
You can follow along in several ways:

• visit the page to see the tweets and those that tweet most often about it (UPDATE — the official hashtag was announced on 1/7/11 and is #rootstech11 — therefore, see http://wthashtag.com/Rootstech11 instead)
• subscribe to the RSS feed (updated subscribe link here)
• write your own tweet directly from the page
• generate a day & time-stamped transcript of the twitter activity (example here)
• the page is a wiki page, so anyone can edit and refine it

Tonight, I went to the site to see if one had been set-up for RootsTech and it had not.   Anyone can create a hashtag archive so after logging in, I created one.  Very easy to accomplish.  Here is some data from the past few days already: you can see the top contributors and which days have more tweets than others.

What makes this site unique is that it creates an archive.  Twitter itself does not allow you to search for hashtags older than a set time period, but with WhatTheHashTag?! you can go back and see the history.  For example, my professional organization – the Medical Library Association, had a conference in May.  The history of our #mla2010 hashtag is not available anymore on Twitter, but an archived transcript can be generated at WhatTheHashTag?!.