The rise of microblogging site Twitter has also given rise to a remarkable number of additional Web sites, services and helper applications that help us Twitterati maximize the benefit of utilizing the service.

You can read about quite a lot of them at The Twitter Fan Wiki, but let's focus on one in particular: Summize.com.

At its most basic, Summize lets you search for specific terms in the public twitterstream. For example, you can see what people are saying about Angelina Jolie with this search: Twitter discussion on Angelina Jolie.

More interestingly, you can use quite a bit more sophisticated searches too, with the Summize advanced search capability. Here's just a piece of it:

If you want to track a particular Twitter account, for example, you can do that. One thing I suggest is that if you have a Twitter account, enter your account name in the "Referencing this account" box. That way, even if someone else talks about you without it being an @ reply, you'll see it. For example, here's a search for people referencing my Twitter account: Tweets referencing @DaveTaylor.

You can also build more complicated searches. Here I'm searching for Vitamin Water or Izze or "Natural soda" and restraining my results to just those in English: "Vitamin Water" OR Izze OR "Natural Soda".

Finally, one of the very best things about Summize is that you can subscribe to any search result as an RSS feed with your favorite RSS reader. Just look on the right side of the results page:

Well worth doing. And yes, you can also just create Summize search result icons on your iPhone home page too, which is how I keep track of Twitter discussions when I'm on the road.

Still looking for more information on Twitter? I have lots of Twitter help here, and you can of course also follow either of my Twitter channels too: @DaveTaylor or @FilmBuzz.