PCWorld - Last week I offered anyone who might be interested a copy of the batch files and other tools (cURL, grep, my nasty little program and the Excel spreadsheet) for analyzing Twitter "Tweets" -- all you had to do was send an e-mail to gearhead@gibbs.com with the subject "TA". I've had quite a few requests and you will get the files in a few days -- the delay is because I found a bug in my nasty little program and I haven't had time to fix it.
While the Excel approach to analyzing Tweets was interesting, I admitted all along it was clumsy and ugly. So if you want to keep track of a current hot topic, say, a mildly interesting topic such as swine flu, how else might you do it?
You could search for exactly that term you're looking for, but with Twitter Tweets there's another way to look for relevant content using "hashtags."
Hashtags is a convention that uses a hash mark (#) to flag words in Tweets users want to be treated as description tags. Thus, the hashtag for swine flu could be "#swineflu" (spaces aren't allowed so hashtags usually merge the words or separate them with dashes or underscores).
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