Yesterday I was contacted by a reporter who wanted stats from our #OWS database to see how the movement was developing. I looked at the overall rate of tweeting with the tags #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet, and found that it has been declining over the last 30 days.
That is one possible story about the Occupy movement, but then I spent time studying some of the other reports and noticed that the Top Hashtags page showed that #Egypt and #Tahrir were ranking very high.
Looking at tweets for the #tahrir tag in the #OWS database it is clear that the term Occupy and the #ows tag has spread well beyond the original idea of protesting against Wall Street excess.
The best explanation for its use in tweets about the protest in Egypt is that it helps these tweets get noticed by politically active people in America. This will make an interesting anachronism years from now when protesters against any injustice tag their tweets with #OWS. At the risk of dating myself, it is analogous to protesters in the Seventies screaming “Attica!”.
