The World Cup is in full swing...there's no avoiding it! For me that's not a problem but I'm broad minded enough to know that there is a great swathe of people who have absolutely NO interest in the beautiful game (fools they are!).

Soooo..to be fair with our non World Cup loving friends we need to think twice before we get carried too away with tweeting and chatting e on the #WorldCup or #wc2010 hashtags. Too much noise will mean unfollows...and the World Cup can be noisy (have you heard the vuvuzelahorn?).

The Solution (part 1)

Now I've thought about this issue before and I created the @chatonly Twitter account to help with this; basically this works as follows. You start every hashtag chat tweet with @ChatOnly - doing so effectively hides the tweet from your followers (but not people searching on the hashtag). Result!

The account cannot be followed so, in essence, its a mute to your typical followers.

And then I thought why not take this one stage further? Why not create a topic account which people can follow if you were interested in it?

The Solution (part 2)

So I created @WCtalk ("World Cup Talk"...geddit?) for this very purpose.

Again it works in exactly the same way as @ChatOnly - simply start all of your #WorldCup or #wc2010 tweets with @WCtalk and the tweets will effectively be hidden from your normal followers. However (and this is the big difference from @ChatOnly) @WCtalk DOES allow followers  - so if some of your followers ARE also following @WCtalk then they will see your World Cup tweets in their timelines anyway...job done!

So, what are you waiting for?! Simply follow @WCtalk today and start prefixing those #WorldCup/#wc2010 tweets :)

Make sense? I admit it can be a bit brain melting :)