This week it's time to start the New Year by clearing out the cobwebs from the corners of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker.

Late last year I wrote a four part series about my Twitter topical sentiment tracking project, The Sentimeter. I explained the technologies behind the system which included OpenAmplify, a semantic analysis engine.

OpenAmplify has just been enhanced and re-released as version 2.0.

This release has some powerful additions and, if you are interested in stuff to do with semantic analysis, this will be fascinating. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote in a book review: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

The next dust bunny (which looks a lot like a dust rhino) concerns a newish Twitter convention. I write "newish" as the idea first appeared about a year ago but it only started to gain common usage about six months ago, and the reason I mention it is that most people have no idea what it's all about.

The convention is called "cotags" and it's a way of allowing multiple contributors to a single Twitter account to identify themselves. Think of it as a type of microformat.

The idea is simple: A string of letters, usually two for a person's initials, is prefaced with a carat symbol ("^") and added to a tweet to indicate which contributor is responsible for the post. You can see an example of cotags in Microsoft's Twitter account where there are four identified contributors using cotags.

Cotagging is a great way to aggregate multiple streams of tweets and at the same time promote the contributors.

While we're on the subject of Twitter, I was surprised to find that last September Vantage Credit Union started allowing its customers to monitor their account balance, deposits, withdrawals, holds and cleared checks via Twitter.

All requests to Vantage have to be "direct" requests (tweets only seen by the sender and the recipient). So, for example, the tweet "d myvcu #bal" will return your account balance while "#tran 100 f9 t0" would transfer $100 from your checking account ("9" in VCU's syntax) to your savings account ("0").

What cotagging and VCU are doing is elegant but as there's no coordinating authority for such standards there's a danger that we'll see convention collisions in the near future with different intentions being assigned to a single format. Just consider that VCU's convention uses a similar convention to the hashtag standard that has been around for a long time.

It would be logical and useful if all financial services shared the same set of hashtags, but I'll bet that unless flying pigs are involved, getting any other banks, credit unions and so on to cooperate is entirely theoretical.

What's really interesting about the VCU service is there's a strong chutzpah involved as the security issues are significant. Twitter is not a secure service and it makes mistakes. For example, for a long time last year you could see at least some of the tweets of Twitter users with protected (that is, private) accounts because somehow Twitter had allowed Google to index them.

My favorite example was Bill Clinton's account (@billclinton), which only had six followers but through the graces of Google you could see the first few characters of all of his recent tweets. You can see some screen shots of this goof in the slides of a lecture I presented last year (the video is also online).

My final dust brontosaurus is a great utility from Bartels Media GmbH called PhraseExpress, a Windows utility that stores and organizes frequently used text snippets and expands abbreviations as you type. It works with any program, including Microsoft Office tools such as Word and Excel, as well as when filling in Web forms and in instant messaging applications. You can also use text shortcuts to launch programs from any other program.

I don't have the space to slice and dice PhraseExpress much further, but I've been using it under Vista Ultimate and it works amazingly well. For non-commercial users there's a free version with limited features (facilities such as macros and text prediction are omitted) while commercial versions start at $29.95. PhraseExpress gets a rating of 4.5.

Gibbs rarely dusts in Ventura, Calif. Send your cleaning suggestionsto gearhead@gibbs.com.