When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.

One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.

According to Bernardo Huberman, director of HP Lab's Social Computing Research Group, it isn't the "most prolific tweeters or those with most followers" as you might expect.

"We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends," said Huberman. "Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

According to Huberman's report, there are 22 Twitter users who dominate the Twitter Trending Topics. Bauley describes a bit of the work behind the report and its findings:

The HP team collected data from Twitter's own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010.  From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was "trending."  Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and theBBC.

Although popular, most of these sites have millions of followers fewer than highly followed tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama or Lady Gaga.

Similarly, the research showed that just having an active Twitter account was not a factor in creating a trend.

What were these 22 accounts? Take a look.

For the intellectually curious, the report is embedded blow in its entirety.

The update is just for the standard desktop client, not the "super-swanky User Streams Preview version", but TweetDeck promises an upgrade for that is also on the way soon.

Two of our favorite new features, however, are "smart cross-posting for longer tweets" and support for t.co, Twitter's new URL shortener that is about to become the default across the network.

If you want to post an update that's longer than Twitter's 140 character limit, TweetDeck will let you, as long as you have a Google Buzz account. It will automatically truncate your update to 140 characters and include a link to the full text on your Buzz account. The only thing we wish here is that it would do the same with Facebook, instead. As for t.co, hovering your mouse pointer over a shortened link will now show the destination URL, taking away the mystery of clicking on a shortened URL.

In addition to all of those, TweetDeck has also added the ability to post photos directly to Posterous - a much requested feature - and support for logging in using a TweetDeck account, which helps to automatically add your accounts if you ever need to re-install.

A full list of additions and bug-fixes is available in the full changelog.

Last month, Twitter started promoting ad keywords in its "trending topics" list. With this system, users are brought to a search results page, where the page is topped by a promoted Tweet. But does it work is the question.

The answer seems to be yes. Today the National Basketball Association purchased "LeBron James" as a trending topic. Discussion on Mr. James has increased markedly since then. Since the topic has been purchased it has gone from 500 Tweets per hour to 3,000 and rising.

Knowing whether the purchase was a wise one will require time. If the purchased topic keeps trending, it may indicate a safe bet for future advertisers.

We got in touch with Google this morning and a spokesman confirmed that the feature is indeed part of a series of experiments the company has been running since early this month.

Image thanks to Joe Hobot.

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found [here].

Google last redesigned its news page last May, adding more visual content to the layout. This time around, we expect to see more in the way of real-time content, including features such as the trending topics seen here.

If you keep a close watch, it is possible you will see other new features that Google is testing, but as the company's blog post points out, often these features will show up and go completely unnoticed. In Hobot's case, the trending topics showed up for a brief period before disappearing again.

We asked about the specifics of the new feature, but Gaither said that statement included above is all the company is saying about it at this time.

Over the summer, we noticed that Twitter was submerging some adult-themed trending topics, and we noted the absolute need for more top-down policing of the trends list, which should be available for surfacing interesting and timely items to engage users. Today, Twitter has finally acknowledged the brokenness of the feature and has stated its intentions to fix the issue.

"So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results."

We are interested to know exactly how this new algorithm will work. Clearly, the wisdom of the masses has proved to be anything but. We hope that, beyond editing the tweets that qualify as representatives of a given trending topic, Twitter will acknowledge that they already do police trending topics, and we hope they will do so with greater diligence, intuition, and intelligence.

Vulgarity and inanity aside, we worry about dupes. For example, right now, FortHood, Fort Hood, and FtHood are all trending topics. Likewise, every time a good football game rears its majestic head, we see the name and city of each team start to trend, along with NFL and the like.

There are many ways in which trending topics are busted, useless, and irritating - hence, many opportunities for making them customizable, interesting, and useful. We're sensing an opportunity for third-party apps to step in here. Traditionally, Twitter is late to the game in making official features from ideas third-party developers have been working on for ages. Unless Twitter takes some impressive and noticeable action, an app might fix trending topics before Twitter does.

Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.

And as of this moment, none of these terms are anywhere to be found on the Twitter website, although they all were a mere 10 minutes ago.

As asinine, spammy, emo, and pointless as trending topics have been in the recent past, why now is the Twitter team choosing to censor that list on their website? Is it the overtly sexual nature of the terms, or the fact that some people would consider those words indecent or profane?

Perhaps this will serve as a nice wake-up call to the team that the trending topics list is rather broken to begin with. Many sites lately have noted that the hashtags only serve as spam fodder, allowing questionable marketers to quickly stuff tweets with the terms to gain more attention for themselves. However, it seems at first glance that the majority of these tweets are coming from honest-to-god users, which is more frightening still. Whether or not the trending-topic tweets are spam, the topics themselves are very often sheer horror to peruse.

Should there be an algorithm for trends rather than making trending topics a pure numbers game? Should the system be fixed so that #liesboystell doesn't win out over truly important, significant, or newsworthy content? Should tweets, like images and other kinds of content, be screened for "adult" material and user preferences be set accordingly? Or do trends really belong to the lowest common denominator?

Some will probably respond that, as a purely statistical measurement, trending topics should fall under a laissez faire system, in which case censorship of those topics would be inaccurate reporting as well as suppression of free speech.

But the world already has Nickelback and Ugg boots; must we let the masses decide on Twitter trends, as well?