Trending Topics

I've stopped looking at Twitter's "Trending Topics," because, frankly, they're spam.

Sure, there may be people out there tweeting about Michael Vick or American Idol, but each time I click on a trend, I get to see a bunch of messages like this:

I just won $30,000 at such-and-whichy casino, URL, Michael Vick American Idol other trending topics, et cetera.

I knew there was a risk of running into spam on Twitter. It's despairing, however, to see how quickly spam is taking over. And it's not just the corporate shills or viagra sellers, either. There are many a Twit who will put a Michael Vick or Star Trek or whatever have you hashtag on a tweet just to get into the trending topics queue. It's getting to the point that a topic or keyword search on Twitter only works if it's not a trending topic -- that's how you find the people (well, most of the people) seriously discussing the subject. In detached bite-sized ypiiety yap only 140 characters long. Sigh. Maybe I'll go back to the telegraph. At least you had to pay for those, which limited for most folks how many they sent . . .