Twitter Trending Topic Pollution

One of my favourite things about Twitter besides telling everyone how awesome my lunch was, is the Trending Topics feature. I've always found it fascinating to see what people are talking about and be part of the "party line" either by reading what people have to say about the topic or jumping into the conversation.

But recently I've noticed a ton of people taking advantage of the system and to me it's really hampering the experience.

Let me pull up one example from a trending topic this instant: Wal-Mart.

Why is it a trending topic right now? Let's see if I can find out.

lcarou2148 Make $20.00 an Hour on Twitter See how here! http://tinyurl.com/mrwcve Michael Jackson harry potter WAL-MART less than 20 seconds ago from web

Swing and a miss. Spam is becoming increasingly prevalent on Twitter and it's really disrupting the conversation. People who throw in trending topics into their tweets to draw attention to their spam are just as evil as any other form of spammer.

chiquitaaa @LegendaryWriter Why the heck is wal-mart in the trending topics??? O.o weird... less than a minute ago from web

It seems like every time something new breaks into the trending topics section, 80% the tweets then become, "Why is this a trending topic?" instead of just hitting the topic button and finding out for themselves. Ugh.

Divas365 I sometimes hook in Wal-Mart parking lots hoping to meet harry potter & Nia long.

Personally the worst to me. The people who think they're clever writing a sentence with every trending topic at that moment are just maddening. Your not clever if everyone on Twitter is doing it. And the idea is dumb in the first place just a shameless cry for e-attention.

I'm about 100 tweets in, and I STILL don't know exactly why Wal-Mart is a trending topic? I found only two bits of news (something about India and something about rating eco-friendly products), but 98% of the Wal-Mart tweets were just garbage.

I'm not sure if there's any solution to spammers or people being...people. But I do miss when it was easy to find out why a trending topic was a trending topic.