What?

Of course, I really believe you should have a Twitter account but you don’t actually need one to follow the tweets (updates) from an event like a conference, TeachMeet or one of the many Twitter-based discussions such as #ukedchat.

Why?

If you are not a Twitter user you may have seen the mysterious ‘hashtags‘ at events and wondered what’s going on – #conf11 #bett2011 etc. Well, it’s really simple – it’s just a way of adding a tag or label to a tweet to make it easy to find all the different people who are talking about the same event, idea or conversation.

So if you can find all the tweets tagged with a particular hashtag, you can follow what’s going on – in real time.

How?

There are many ways to follow a hashtag so I’m going to concentrate on just four contrasting alternatives – none of which require a Twitter account.

1. Twitter’s own search engine

As you might expect, Twitter has its own way of following hashtags – http://search.twitter.com It’s a very simple system and here’s how you use it:

2. Google ‘Realtime’ search

Quite recently, Google started to take note of tweets and other real-time updates. The search giant began to index these status updates and add them to its search results. So now you can use Google to get a live feed of a hashtag as well. Here’s how it works:

3.  Twitterfall

A very different kind of tweet search is available at http://www.twitterfall.com It is the search engine of choice for live events as it produces a very helpful, live,  graphical display of the tweets as they are made. Once again, there’s no need for a Twitter account. Here’s how it works:

4. Visible Tweets

About as far removed from Twitter’s own search engine as is possible is http://www.visibletweets.com This really is for use on a large screen to display tweets as they come in. Take a look :

So the choice is yours – arm yourself with a hashtag search engine and start following those live updates in real time.