NBC Olympic Pulse is my newest online obsession.
Designed by the  smart folks at Stamen Design, Olympics Pulse takes the best of twitter, tumblr, and the real time web, mashes it and serves it up right in front of your eyes. Talk about live online, this is where it’s going.

Real time tracking is certainly not new technology, Google began real time trend watching in their search at the end of 2009.

I’ve known about Twitterfall long before that. Twitterfall is a great way to track live social media conversations in real time.

But I’m mostly interested in what happens as this technology goes more mainstream and customizable by the everyday user. For example, I started playing around a simple twitter tracker from wiffiti that shows real time results for what’s being said about any 5 topics you’re interested in. Build your own at Wiffiti.com, it takes about 2 minutes. The one below tracks what people are saying about Marketing, Advertising, PR, Branding and Social Media.  It also shows photos from Fickr tagged with those keywords.

So far Stamen Designs’ projects, have everyone beat, in my opinion but the real time internet is just going to get better and better.

TRY IT: What topics will you track in real time?  Leave me a comment below with a link to your Wiffiti if you’re so inclined. Want to see your tweets show up in real time? Click on the photo above to launch the Wiffiti in a new window then text @wif17567 + your message to 87884 to see it in action.

Editors’ Note:  The real time link was on the blog but at the time this post went live Wiffiti was upgrading servers and it was slowing down my site. For now, click on the photo of the live feed and launch the real time feed in a new window.

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Hitch is a consultancy that helps marketers hire the right marketing agency.

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I think I first heard Charlene Li say it at last year’s SXSWi in Austin:  Web search will continue to move toward real time. Today, Google made it a reality with the announcement of Real Time Search.

Just one of the many tectonic shifts continuing to happen in communications.  Everything is integrated and the  Google fellows give more detail on their blog than I can ever hope to explain here.

Real time search:  it’s exciting.  It’s cool.  It’s amazing.  But I do have 2 gnawing questions:

This is an excerpt from a guest post on B2B Bloggers.com.  To read entire post, click here.

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