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He used twitter search to find everybody and their dog twittering about it. I think his argument is that google search is not set up to provide this kind of information as quickly.

I think the idea is that it's easy to find a pattern when you are looking for one, but in this case, the author wasn't really looking for a pattern. He typed some stuff into twitter, and the pattern emerged in real time.

That is pretty cool.

(It would be even cooler if the author didn't bold every other word.)

What if something happens where there isn't an omniscient authority? Or if the authority is unresponsive?

The cool thing (according to the author) was using twitter search to find too many submissions accepted for RailConf...

Well, can you think of an example, even a contrived one? I can't anyhow.