With the popularity of micro-blogging platform Twitter, and the ability to track updates and conversations in real-time, it's often effective to supply your tweets with a custom hashtag, in order to have them filtered in search results, or appear in custom applications.

But how does one follow tweets tagged with a specific hash? Also, how can you more effectively distribute your own custom tagged tweets to a wider audience?

Monitoring tagged tweets

It's easy to monitor tweets tagged with a specific hash. The quickest way is to use Twitter's own search utility, available at search.twitter.com. Simply type in the hash keyword you wish to monitor:

Real-time updates will continue to load on the page. You can also opt to monitor activity via RSS, if you'd rather not remain on the same page for an extended period of time.

Other tools include hashtags.org, and third-party Twitter clients that allow you to track tweets containing a specific hash.

Distributing tagged tweets to a wider audience

If you're using your own custom hashtag, or looking to better distribute tweets containing a specific hashtag, you may be interested in ways to increase exposure or presence of tweets containing the hashtag.

Besides directing followers of your hashtag to the suggested sites above, you can also take it a step further by implementing a widget or stream of tweets containing your hashtag on any webpage.

First, you need to obtain a feed or source of the data - the quickest way is to use the RSS feed from search.twitter.com. Then, you could parse the RSS feed (using PHP, for example), and display the results on any webpage.

It would be nice if there was a simple utility that let you input a specific hashtag, and it would provide you code for an embeddable JavaScript or Flash widget - no programming required.

Let us know if you have easier or better ways to monitor, obtain, or distribute tagged tweets.