This post was written by Matthew Kraft (@MKraft), who spends entirely too much time online. One of these days that will pay off, as will all those years he spent reading obscure literature in grad school.

Last week I was researching Swine Flu/H1N1 for a client, using Twitter. The WHO had just upgraded the pandemic to Phase 6, so lots of people were talking about it. This looked like it would make my job easy–use Trending Topics to take the temperature of the Twitterverse, as it were. It turned out to be more like getting a room full of kindergartners to tell you about their pets while an ambulance screams by - you may get some information, but it’s mostly useless blathering and screaming.

Trending Topics has the possibility to be a really useful tool, from both a research point of view and a marketing perspective. Want to find out not only what the Twitterverse is talking about, but *how* they’re talking about it? This is your place. It’s zeitgeist central for the hottest communication tool on the planet. However, since Trending Topics came to the front of everyone’s twitter homepage, the increase in spam is immense. Today, it’s a pretty safe can bet that any trending topic is half-full of bandwagon-jumpers and coattail-riders, spammers who throw up topic keywords just to get on the front page of results.

This phenomenon wouldn’t be so bad were it not for three things:

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