But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ’swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…

Make sure you write it down so people know whether it has dots, hyphens or underscores. For example, here is a Technorati search for ted2009 (over 200 results). And here is one for ted09 (just 3 results).

Here’s how the New England Chapter of ASIST asks attendees to do it. And here’s the principle in action at Flickr for Bath Spa’s Institutional Web Management event.

Enforcement is another matter, but at least if you let people know what the right format is, they are more likely to use it in their writing and when tagging blog posts, slides, photos etc.

UKOLN have a great briefing paper Use Of Social Tagging Services At Events.