The new functionality of Google Blog Search is not without its bugs though. One user pointed out some problems in a Google Groups post about her name drawing results based on blogs having her in their blogrolls. This attracted a response from Jeremy Hylton of the Google Blog Search Team:

We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page.  We’ve had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds that you mentioned.  The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds.  The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog’s posts.

We expected some problems from blogroll matches, but may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name.  We do expect to fix the problem you’re seeing.  We’ll use the full page content, but exclude the content that isn’t really part of the post.  I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved.

Barry Schwartz mentions in a comment on Vanessa Fox’s blog that he has been seeing these changes for about a month, so the changes have evidently been around for a while without attracting much attention.

What is it? What is it used for? What is its potential? What are the limits? Who else is using it and why? What can we learn from it? Should I be using it too? Is it okay if I walk away from it? Do I have to use the word "tweet?"

 While you’re at it, ask yourself what is the meaning of a fallen leaf, if there really is one main sound from which all sounds spring, what is the likelihood of becoming one with a stone and understanding its stone-ness, and whether you should wear acid-washed jeans should they ever come back in style.

The frontrunner for answering the Twitter reality question is that all signs seem to point toward "yes."

Is it useful? Yes. Is it a waste of time? Yes. Is it not a waste of time? Yes. Is there not a point to these questions? Yes.

Some are simply walking away from the questions. Andrew Baron put his Twitter account, and his 1,400 followers up for auction on eBay. Why? He wasn’t really using it. As you might imagine, this sparked all kinds of other questions, including whether or not an individual Twitter account, like someone’s stream-of-consciousness, has real monetary value. Current bid is $1,125.

Hugh Macleod didn’t waste much time explaining or pondering the monetary value of his account. To him it was worth the amount of time it took to hit the delete button.

For those not sniffing and walking away, new applications are popping up with more frequency to help make the most of your Twitterized reality. Most recently, there’s Twitlinks.com, a sort of real-time version of Techmeme, selectively pulling from tweets emanating from the Important Bloggers Club.

If, while your BlackBerry is inaccessible, your thumbs are involuntarily tweeting onto the pages of Sky Mall, you can plan ahead to ease your OCD by using TweetLater, which allows you to schedule tweets in advance of your absence.

Which makes it sound really important. Or pathetic, one.

For me, it’s not about collecting followers. You can never be too sure, as with anything on the Internet, what’s real and what’s not. This morning I was tested by Andre Nantel, whose new Twitter account asked "RU4Real?" The experiment yields just how many either blindly follow, or have scripts that make them blindly follow.

Dr. Phil, and behaviorists like him, would say nobody does anything without some kind of payoff. You could use the TweetCloud application to pool a person’s tweets together to get a better idea of what that payoff might be. For Jason Calacanis, his pet topic, understandably so, is Mahalo. So there’s that.

There’s also a closer reason for why I use Twitter: I view it as a kind of impressionist painting. Not that those impressions are always true. You could look at my TwitterCloud and make all kinds of incorrect conclusions, even though some insights into my psyche might be accurate. For me, it’s the real-time, fuzzy glimpse at reality that is important, not necessarily the moral of the tale.

The best stories, by the way, have no point.

But maybe more than one will join in fascination by watching Baron’s artistic Twitter Madness YouTube submission, which broadcasts without any external commentary the randomness of Twitterers. (Externally, I will comment that it is a good reflection of the randomness of creation and thought in general.)

What I like about Twitter is knowing that handlebar moustaches are coming back, that Craig Newmark is hanging out at Carmel winery, that Bluegrass still matters in the Bluegrass, and that Robert Scoble is confused about the time change in Israel—and that Scoble is hanging out there with a bunch of other key influencers.

I guess, but do not know, that at the end of the day Twitter for me is about a weird Twitter nirvana, where I can observe but not be a part of, where truth and untruth sweep across my horizon in a way that I am separate from them, where reality is what it is: something indefinable.