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.