Every Saturday I’m going to post a weekly round up of posts that I’ve found interesting over the course of the previous seven days, and that I hope will inspire you to look for blogs you mightn’t otherwise found. This week the spotlight will be on Twitter, as more and more people are beginning to take an interest in the micro-blogging service, or, as some wit I over heard yesterday called it, ‘the sociably unsocial lifeline’.

Tom Raftery collated his top 15 Twitter tips into a post following a friend’s decision to start using Twitter. I mparticulalry agreed with Tom’s 16th (extra!) tip about using your username on different social profiles – this is an important step in establishing your online identity.

The big news for me this week was that using twiter as a search engine, is now more popular than using Google blog search. Steve Rubel said:

Google Blog Search traffic is flat and, only until just recently, the same can be said for Technorati. More importantly, Twitter Search has just about eclipsed Google Blog Search. As of February, Twitter Search attracted 1.35 million users while Google Blog Search, which has been plagued by relevance issues, sits at 1.38 million users.

Something that will indeed be worth keeping an eye on.

Interesting post over at Soshable, looking at how Twitter can tear friends apart, as two tweeps set about a race to gain 10,000 followers. The pertinent point here is that once you’ve got 10,000 followers, how will you manage them all?

Blake Cahill wrote an interesting post on Vis Insights looking at the growing importance of Twitter with a good summary of what makes Twitter important now, and why it will become increasingly more so as the way tweeps use the service develops:

All these consumer and business conversations be it on Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn platforms are where brands and digital investment will continue to flow. The need for marketers and organizations to understand this new landscape and to build and deploy the people, processes, and technologies to interact with these new channels is impertative.

Zac Johnson is running a Twitter blog competition, where the idea is to win some prizes by following Zac and essentially promoting his blog through your twitter feed it is a novel way of drawing attention to your work and I look forward to seeing the results.