August 8, 2008 is here and so is the latest Twitter hashtag (#tag) campaign: #080808.

Twitter is a "microblogging" platform that allows users to post updates to their profiles in 140 characters or less, about the length of typical English sentence or a Chinese paragraph.

With Twitter search engines such as Tweet Scan and Twitter Search, it's possible to search every Twitter update made around the world in chronological order with simple keywords. For example, if you wanted to know what the world's Twitterers were saying about Danwei at any given time, you could use either Tweet Scan or Twitter Search and search "Danwei."

The #080808 campaign allows microbloggers to participate in a worldwide timeline of online Twitter chatter about August 8, 2008, the start of the Beijing Olympics games. The campaign only requires "#080808" to be included in a Twitter update so that it can be easily indexed by Tweet Scan or Twitter Search.

If you want to to see the latest Twitter buzz about the Beijing Olympic Games in English, Chinese, and several other languages, link here or here (timeline results should be the same). Also, check out the #080808 campaign Web site which includes a "tag timeline" widget along the right-hand side of the page with all the latest #080808 Twitter updates.

The campaign is not limited to Twitter. The #080808 tag can be used to tag any online content (Flickr pics, YouTube videos, text blog postings, Technorati / Google Blogsearch, etc.). Click here for a mash-up Web site created by Junyu Wang that aggregates all the latest multimedia postings tagged "#080808" into a single, simple interface.

The #080808 campaign was created by Steven Lin (aka Flypig), Wang Li Ang (aka Webleon), and Chloe Gu (aka Babechloe) just a couple of days ago (Aug 6th) and appears to have spread among Web 2.0 enthusiasts around the world.