Tried out David Sterry’s (alias gnome weex) search engine Tweet Scan a real-time search engine for Twitter posts. I was quite surprised to find how this tool may be used for personal alerting and imagined how the service may prove its value as a “personal reputation scan”, a “corporate imago scan” or a frequent scan on any other particular subject of interest.
In my imagination I picture search assistents like this as tomorrows web 2.0 tool for the activity that information specialists used to lable as Selective Dissimination of Information (SDI). Obviously such alerts may be useful to keep track of “good” and “bad” twurts.
Tweet Scan may deliver the tweets in your email and can be set up with a daily or weekly frequency. Twitterers be aware of this !
RSS now available for any search. Subscribe to any search you can think of by clicking on the RSS link on the upper right of the search results. (..) TweetScan emails are great for reading during meetings, conference calls, and waiting at the DMV.
When for example I filled in my first and last name I got this tweet back by mail on my cellular. And filling in my twitter id alerts about any responses on my tweets. Trying a search on Howard Rheingold or Bryan Alexander gives ofcourse a more interesting result 
Applications like Terraminds (see search on Bhutto) and Twittermail aggregate responses to tweets as well. Playing with them a bit demonstrated to me how short message blogging changed the (micro)world in 2007.
Comments
@ 09:45
Tweet Scan is one of the three Twitter search engines that are capable of generating RSS feeds on any given query. The other two are TwitterVision and Terraminds. The latter search engine, developed by Chris Laux, is now integrated into two prominent Twitter clients: Snitter and Twhirl. I personally tend to check all engines for new tweets because every so often they all seem to miss tweets.
Although all of these engines already provide considerable value, in my opinion they could vastly improve by offering these features:
1. recognize me as a user and offer a default personalized Twitter search results page based on my known interests, preferably generated from my attention profile stored in an APML file
2. recommend new topics based on what others have searched for already
3. support for advanced search queries: by user, by time frame, “phrase search”, boolean operators (scobleizer OR steverubel) etc.
4. query history, so that I can easily repeat queries
5. tag clouds generated from the search results
6. output to my preferred instant messaging service
7. offer list of submitted search queries as an OPML file
Very interested in everything related to Twitter, I maintain two Twitter projects myself:
http://twitter.com/twtooltrack
This is a Twitter account I maintain to track Twitter accounts from people who publish in English about the Twitter tools they develop.
@twtooltrack now follows the developments of about a hundred Twitter tools.
http://snipr.com/twitter_grazr
This is an RSS-based news radar that tracks blogs, news feeds and blog searches from and about Twitter. As of writing, this radar tracks about 50 feeds.
@ 14:23
Thank you, Marjolein! Very useful. Would love to know how you set up your news radar.
@ 11:40
…a much needed and I assure you *much* appreciated tool! Thanks!!
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department
@ 14:40
Hi Howard,
Thank you too.
Well, to answer your question about creating news radars: I more or less built my own routine for it and have published quite a few of them over the past few years, usually to enrich a CleverClogs blog post with dynamic content or just because a certain topic or technology interests me. I also create them in commission.
I collect blogs from people considered authoritative on a topic, gathering relevant keywords along the way. Then I perform searches and add all of the resulting feeds to an OPML editor. At the moment I use BlogBridge Feed Library for this, but basically any feed reader capable of exporting to OPML would do.
Most of my news radars contain a river of news feed that combines the posts from all feeds in reversed chronological order. This custom feed is inserted back into the OPML.
I then move the OPML resulting from this procedure to present the news radar full-page or embedded on a web page as a widget.
My most advanced public news radar to date is Podcasting Professionals, which you can find at http://snipr.com/podpros
I very much appreciate feedback.
@ 11:45
Thank you, Marjolein. Very interesting site. I’ve added it to my resource lists. I also watched the screencast. I’m still not sure how to do it. I’d love to see a screencast on how to set up a news radar!
@ 13:17
Marjolein — Can you tell me why I should switch from Bloglines to Grazr? Or are they different tools for different purposes?