Many of you are not on Twitter and have no interest in become twits. (And good for you. Those not interested in Twitter are probably you younger readers. New research shows that it's us old fogies, believe it or not, that are taking to Twitter in greater numbers than you young whippersnappers. But I'm old and I digress ...)

On Twitter, you 'follow' other Twitterers. But what if you're interested in a particular subject rather than an individual Twit? One thing Twits do is set up 'hashtags', which are, essentially, channels on a particular topic. Twits include this hashtag in every tweet so that various search engines and Tweet-reading applications can track the hashtag.

Today, with election gossip heating up, I thought it time that it time we set aside a hashtag to handle Tweets for the next federal general election.

Now, coming up with a hashtag is an art form itself. Remember, on Twitter, you only get 140 characters to say something. So you don't want hashtags to be taking up too many characters. Mind you, you want them to be unique and you want them to be easy to remember and, if possible, give you a hint about what it's about. Conservatives, for example like to twit on the hashtag #roft. That's unique and its short but it's not self-evident what it's about. (roft stands for Right OF Twitter). Liberals are tweeting away on the hashtag #lpc. That's outstandingly short and political junkies will recognized the acronym but it still requires specialized knowledge. I started one up to track all the money Ottawa spends called #ottawaspends . That gives you a good hint about what the hashtag is about but, it's a little long and eats up too many characters.

So back to an election hashtag: I proposed we start out with #elxn09 and then, if we get through this year, we can turn it into #elxn10.

Kerry Wall, who works for CBC News, helpfully tweeted back the following:

"@davidakin You could also go with a varation on #41stcdnelxn; hard on the eyes but it won't matter whether the election is in 2009 or 2010."

Excellent point, Kerry. Whether it's this year or next, the next general election will be the 41st general election in Canada's history. So I'm taking up Kerry's suggestion but, remembering that we want to keep hashtags as short as possible, I'm going to suggest we go with #elxn41 to tweet about the next election.

So, bottom line: If you're a Twitterer, I invite you to include the hashtag #elxn41 in anything you think is election related. For the rest of you, check out this Web page to catch up on #elxn41 gossip or, better yet, grab the RSS feed and have this content pushed out to you.