Are there programs that capture tweets in realtime that have certain keywords? Are there correlation tools that map between users and keywords? Can you have something like PageRank, only for tweets (or tweeters?)
It's like Google Trends for Twitter. Instead of queries, we track what people say. You can see how a keyword explodes and becomes a trend in an hour or two.
For example, yesterday someone saw an amber alert. It turns out this person was the mother of @ddlovato, who has 600k followers. You can see the mother's tweet, ddlovato's mention 18 minutes later and a subsequent explosion of retweets until they reached 0.4% of all tweets during the hour (that's probably in the thousands).