The precise algorithm for determining trends is private, but the basic thrust is that it’s not about volume, or else Justin Bieber would be forever trending. The algorithm adapts over time, based on the changing velocity of the usage of the given term in tweets. if we see a systematic rise in volume, but no clear spike, it is possible that the topic will never trend, as the algorithm takes into account historical appearances of a trend. The implications are clear:

1. The longer a term stays in the trending topic list, the higher velocity required to keep it there.
2. It is much easier for a term never seen before to become a Twitter trend, and finally
3. It is extremely important to understand what else is happening in the region or network (if Kim Kardashian’s show is airing, you can forget about trending!).

Over the past four weeks, I’ve been tracking the usage of Twitter amongst the OWS movement, drawn to understand how and why OWS related phrases and hashtags trend in certain regions but not in others. For example, #OccupyWallStreet is the most commonly used hashtag since the start of the movement, yet the term trended in Vancouver, Portland, Italy and San Francisco. Contrary to intuition, It has never appeared as a trending topic in New York, where most of the action took place.

Let's say among the connected world now 2 billion we each have 100 conversations per day. So that's 200 billion conversations per day. I am excluding SMS, voicemail and email for now.

There are close to 100 million tweets per day so relatively speaking a tiny percentage of our conversations have moved to Twitter (yet). Right now we don't have motive to share everything we say with the world. But just imagine you were rewarded for sharing your conversations not just some of them but all of them. How do you feel about that? Suspicious, a scam, why, what's the catch? Just think about that for second. Benefit based conversation sharing. In the end this will become the norm. We will share and publish everything. The pros outweigh the cons.

Imagine it's in public interest in the interest of free of speech for you to post and share all your conversations. Imagine if they were automatically recorded and posted to Twitter anyway. How would you feel about that? Excited or shocked horror.

One thing we know is we can't stand people intruding into either our private or professional lives but we also know we want to search everything particularly the world's conversations and Twitter is the world talking. Twitter is the world's conversation.

Vastly superior to Facebook Twitter is open, random and supportive. Twitter search you can see in Google search updating seemingly in real time and the content there is far more interesting than anything I read on Facebook most of which I already know as I already know my friends pretty well.

Twitter tells you what you don't know.

Twitter is The News.

Twitter is Gossip.

Twitter is Trivia.

Twitter is Intelligence.

Twitter is Distribution.

Twitter is Lead Generation.

Twitter is Public Relations.

Twitter is Financial Announcements.

Twitter is Accidents and Events.

Twitter is The World we live in Real Time - think about that a moment.

Twitter is your life and mine.

Twitter is your business life and mine.

Twitter might be how to run a business.

Twitter is a new currency. Conversation currency.

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network.

(If Google don't buy Twitter today, then it's Twitter that will eventually end up buying Google tomorrow !)

In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn't uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What's happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:

• Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
• Blogging, at least in the "bleeding edge" technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there's certainly some circumstanstial evidence - just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 - there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
• Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.

Are you a blogger? Are people not commenting on your blog posts like they used to? Is your traffic down a little? Don’t take it personally, you’re just experiencing the Twitter Effect. Everyone’s having similar experiences too, so don’t worry.