When you want to see what people are saying about several topics at once, and you want to watch the conversations in real-time, try a service like TweetGrid (http://tweetgrid.com) or Monitter (http://monitter.com), shown here.

They're useful not only for seeing what people are saying, but also for getting a sense of the speed and volume of tweets on different topics.

If you find yourself keeping an eye on the same searches every day, consider using Twitter via a client like Twhirl or TweetDeck, which lets you easily save and see searches. We describe third-party programs later in this chapter.