Orange County Register

Confused about Twitter? sOCial sunday has your man! Kevin Sablan is the leader of the Register’s web task force and blogs independently about hyperlinks on Almighty Link. This week’s “twip” …

People are using Twitter to break news, report from crime scenes, and share links to news articles, blog posts, images and videos. But how do you separate news from the rest of the Twitter chatter? And what if you’re not on Twitter? Here are some sites that will help you find news on Twitter, even if you don’t use the microblogging service.

1. Twitter Search is Twitter’s official search site. If you click on one of the “trending topics” listed on its home page, you’lll see most of the tweets related to that topic. If you walk away from the screen for a few minutes, a message will show you how many tweets you’ve missed and prompt you to refresh the page to see them.
2. Twithority ranks its Twitter search results by the authority of  each user, as measured by the number of followers. Again, you can click on currently popular searches from Twithority’s home page.
3. Scoopler shows Twitter messages as soon as they are tweeted, without having to refresh the browser. Once more, you can click on popular searches from the list of “hot topics” on Scoopler’s home page. Topic pages also displays relevant links, images and videos, and lets you preview them without leaving the site.
4. Twazzup is very much like Scoopler, but adds a couple of great features to its results pages. A list of contributors shows users who have tweeted, are have been retweeted, frequently. Click on a list of related keywords to refine your search. If you sign in with your Twitter username and password, you can save your searches.
5. Topsy is more like Google than Twitter. It searches for links, not tweets. But it ranks those links based on how many times they are tweeted,  and the “influence” of the the people who post those tweets. Again, trending topics appear on Topsy’s front page.
6. OneRiot works very much like Topsy, but it also takes a look at Digg and other social networking sites to come up with its results.
7. MicroPlaza has a home page with links to “popular topics and news” based on the number of times they are tweeted. This site has a twist for current Twitter users: it can create a list of links popular among the people you follow.
8. Breaking Tweets is unlike the other site mentioned here. It is a good old-fashioned blog, powered by humans who scour Twitter for news and then carefully choose certain tweets to include in posts covering global news and events.

There are many more places, and Twitterers, that Twitter users can follow to get news, but I’ll leave that to another post. For now, pleas let me know of any Twitter-related sites or services that I might have unintentially left out of this list.

Interested in how links connect people, companies and news organizations? Follow Kevin Sablan on Twitter @ksablan.

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