When explaining the power of microblogging (e.g. Twitter) to others, it helps to share my own occasional "Aha!" moments.

On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that an economic stabilization bill had been written and was available at financialservices.house.gov. I tried going there for about 10 minutes, but the servers were swamped.

So I went to Twitter search, and merely searched for "bill". The immediate results included several comments about the bill, and at least two links to download it from non-swamped servers. This tells me a couple things: I trusted in the critical mass of contributions to Twitter that I would find what I wanted - and sure enough, it was there. It also shows the power of searching the immediate NOW.

A Google search for "bill" includes a 5-hour old news link, imdb's of movies like "Bill" and "Kill Bill" and wikipedia entries on Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. But for the moment I was searching for "bill" on Twitter, there was only one "bill" that mattered most.

This is how Twitter brings together the massive amounts of information being fed it NOW with what I am searching for NOW. This is just one way Twitter works, if you know how to use it.

I'm working a presentation that includes the concept of search as social media, both in terms of ranking algorithms that are based on socializing links, as well as how search results can expose emergent properties of social consensus. An example of the latter arose as I was writing about the gorilla among wikis, and deciding how much that gorilla should weigh.  Let's check Google:

Weight of Gorilla (lbs.) Number of Google Hits 100 1,020 200 1,930 300 13,100 400 12,100 500 33,900 600 14,400 700 1,180 800 242,000 900 23,500 1000 915 1100 9 1200 353 1300 3 1400 8 1500 194 1600 214 1700 0 1800 57 1900 3 2000 1,380

Obviously, "800-pound gorilla" is the 800-pound gorilla of gorilla weights, even though adult males average about 400 pounds, are about 500 pounds at the extreme in the wild, and obese gorillas tip the scales at about 600 pounds in captivity.

Why 800? Maybe someone out there knows. What do you see in the other values? A 100-pound gorilla? Really? The values are higher around realistic gorilla weights, then drop off at 700 before spiking at 800. At 900 they are relatively high but then drop at again 1000. Why not 1000? Is it because people want to say an "X hundred pound gorilla" and not a "thousand pound gorilla" - so "ten hundred" doesn't work? Then, past 1000, there are some little spikes. Not 1100, but 1200. Not 1300 or 1400, but 1500 and 1600. I guess 1600 is two 800-pound gorillas. Then not a single 1700 pound gorilla to be found, but when you get to a ton, you're up there again.

This is a silly example, of course, but with a little thought, I'm sure you could construct some searches that show you social consensus points for other kinds of data.

DB's post riffing a bit on the Large Hadron Collider spurred some random thoughts on my part.

The earth is still here today, but despite premature media fearmongering, it's because the collider hasn't started colliding things yet - they only sent the particles in one direction. So things are OK - for now. That lets everyone get up to speed on the science, which is good.

I'm not surprised by the play that the LHC Rap has received on YouTube, and one of the key investigators at LHC is former rocker Brian Cox. It used to be that rockers wanted to destroy their hotel rooms, but now they're aiming higher. And while I'm at the random connections, how many ex-rocker physicists named Brian do we need?

After the East Bay Earthquake last week - the biggest earthquake in the East Bay all week - I checked Twitter to see how many status updates would follow and, sure enough, there they were.

But what's going to happen after the LHC really does start colliding things? In the spirit of the site to check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive, there is one that now checks on the status of planet earth. Though that seems a little old school - we've been checking on Abe since Web 1.0 days.

However, checking status may not be feasible if everyone is gone, so the day before the collisions start, I think I'll load up Leon's Gratis Status facebook app with half "the earth is gone", and half "the earth has survived", and roll the dice. If nobody is left to observe, maybe they'll both come true!

Next up: what is the sound of two hadrons colliding?