What is it: #FridayFollow or #FollowFriday?
No matter if you call it Friday Follow or Follow Friday, at the end of each work week you'll find thousands (if not millions) of people using hashtags to give digital shout outs to their friends and fans on Twitter.
The Friday Follow tradition is great for finding new and interesting tweeters. And since the #FridayFollow hashtags are posted by other tweeps who know them, they're usually great introductions. If you like one person on Twitter, you'll often like someone they follow. But you don't have to limit yourself to only checking out the #FridayFollow recommendations from people you follow, you can do a Twitter search for the common #FridayFollow hashtags to see everyone's #FF.
A #FridayFollow can come in many different forms, but they generally look like this (an example of recommending yours truly):
If you crack open the Twitter search site and do a search, or if you click on one of the links I've provided below, you'll see a lot of love being shared with other folks on Twitter. (Especially on a Friday) Oh, and keep in mind that as with most Twitter-related searches, none of the search terms below are case sensitive.
Some people do one #FF per tweet and say something specific about the person they're recommending, some post one tweet with a #FF and link to a bunch of people, and some people (like me) mix it up. Once you get through your first few Friday's on Twitter you'll get the hang of it. 
You can follow me on Twitter at @halfbrown and check out all of my #FridayFollow tweeps.
#Hashtag 101 – What They Are & What They Do.
When used in a tweet, a hashtag is a word, or words, which have been prepended with a hash symbol (#) to assist in organizing information about them. For example, if you wanted to create a hashtag out of the word "Twitter", you'd type it as "#Twitter" (no, they aren't case-sensitive). See how simple it is? With the addition of one character, a new hashtag is born.
By using hashtags, a tweet is given additional metadata that can flow inline with the 140 characters used in it and increase it's searchability by people interested in the topic. But it's not all fun-and-games. Adding too many hashtags isn't helpful, and it's actually kind of spammy. While there's no upper-limit on how many you can use, a ballpark number would be 3-4 hashtags per tweet (plus or minus a couple).
So what does all that mean for the average user? Well, simply put, if you want to gain attention to a particular topic or if you want to make it easier for others to find the things you're tweeting about, adding a hashtag would be the way to go. Hashtags are also calculated into Twitter's trending topics, which are the most active topics of discussion occurring at any given time. The more of a particular tag that are tweeted, the more likely it is to become a trending topic.
If you're interested in finding out more about hashtags and which ones are currently trending topics you can do it in two relatively easy places:
Use Twitter itself. Trends are located on Twitter search (below the search field). If you're logged into Twitter, there's also a "Trending Topics" area on the sidebar, directly underneath the "Lists" area. And... if you're one of the lucky ones, Twitter has recently pushed a new "location-based trends " test to approximately 1% of it's users in the same place as the existing trends within the Twitter sidebar.
A third-party site that's been set up to actively monitor and display hashtags. There are plenty of resources online, and I've got a few examples of ones I've previously used below:
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hashtags.org:
A great starting point for finding trending topics, hashtags.org provides a simple interface to search for tags. Make sure to follow @hashtags to have your hashtags tracked.
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wthashtag.com:
This site uses a wiki to track trending topics and allows viewers to add a definition to the tags. WTHashtag.com lists active tags, categories, and even has it's own search bar that you can install.
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monitter.com:
monitter.com lets you select up to 3 hashtags to watch in real-time. It also has an option to let you choose the distance from a certain area (10-100 km or miles from a specific city, state, zip code, etc.) and only see the hashtags from that area. I like to use monitter.com to find local folks who are interested in the same things that I am based on their keywords or hashtags.
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whatthetrend.com:
Another website that shows hashtags in real-time, whatthetrend.com has a nice, clean page that displays the trending topics in a simple list format. Another great feature is that the hashtags are not only defined, but they can be redefined if necessary.
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hashtags.org:
