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Today’s massive student protests in Britain have produced a huge amount of Twitter traffic, much of it using the #demo2010 hashtag. But although a number of tags and phrases connected with the demonstrations have trended in the UK over the course of the day, #demo2010 has been strangely — and entirely — absent from the country’s trending topics list.

Why that’s the case still isn’t clear, but a comparison of the relative frequency of tweets using that tag with phrases that have trended in the UK today reveals that it’s not because of lack of traffic.

(click on graph to see it full size)

As of right now — nearly 3 o’clock in the afteroon NYC time — the top four trending topics on UK Twitter are #uksnow, #dayx, #wonderlandwednesday, and McKeith. But as this chart shows, #demo2010 has more than double the traffic of any of them at this hour, and has been far ahead of them all for the entire day. At around noon London time today #demo2010 peaked at 0.2% of total Twitter traffic, according to this chart — more than triple the volume of any of the current top four.

So what’s going on? I’m going to continue to dig, and others are on the case as well. More soon.

Update | Via Twitter, in response to this post, comes the suggestion that #demo2010 can’t trend because there’s a Twitter user with @demo2010 as their handle, and Twitter doesn’t allow strings that are identical to usernames to trend.

Second Update | The above explanation is incorrect. There’s a @dayx account, has been since 2008, and #dayx has been trending all day.

Third Update | Twitter honcho Del Harvey (@delbius) says, in response to a tweeted query, “we aren’t blocking” #demo2010. In followup tweets she guesses that the tag’s failure to trend may be an artifact of Twitter’s algorithms — “The more something is talked about, the more it needs to be talked about in order to be a trend” — but offers no inside info as to what’s going on.

If the trending algorithms are keeping #demo2010 off the list — and if the stats I’ve seen for #demo2010 tweets are accurate — then I must say that the algorithms strike me as seriously flawed. Take a look at what happens when you expand the graph linked above to cover the last thirty days, instead of the last 24 hours…

What this shows us is that #demo2010 spiked high on November 10, and about half as high — but still really high — today. Both spikes were dramatic, and both reflected huge interest in the topic. More importantly, both spikes were spikes — today’s pop in the numbers reflects a rebound from something close to zero between November 13 and November 22.

Compare that to “McKeith,” which did trend today. That term had two huge spikes in the last couple of weeks, and fairly consistent traffic in between and after. It trended even though its traffic today was actually quite similar to the traffic its been seeing over the last ten days.

I’m not taking a conspiratorial view of this, but I do think it’s weird, and it does strike me as bad coding — if in fact coding is the problem.

Fourth Update | Tweeter @adrianshort argues that the “diversity of tweets for TV programmes” versus the “huge numbers of RTs” for #demo2010 may explain the latter’s failure to trend. (Gillian McKeith is currently appearing on “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” in the UK.) And though there have been a lot of unique #demo2010 tweets today, there have also been a lot of RTs, so this explanation strikes me as the most plausible I’ve heard so far.

In a separate tweet, Short suggests that trending topics may not actually be such a huge deal for an event like today’s demonstrations, since “You get massive network effects from normal RTing a popular tag.” I’m inclined to agree with that, too.

British students, building on protests that sent fifty thousand people into the streets of London two weeks ago, are staging demonstrations in dozens of cities today against government plans to slash funding for higher education and triple student fees.

Resources from around the web:

• I published an introduction to the protests earlier this week, and I’ve been tweeting all day at @studentactivism.

• The Guardian newspaper has a liveblog of the day’s events.

• The BBC’s television news coverage of the protests can be found online here.

• The main Twitter hashtag for the protests is #demo2010.

• The journalist @paul__lewis is tweeting from the scene in London.

• Britain’s Education Activist Network is covering the story on their blog.

Send along additional links in comments, and I’ll add them to this post.

I’ll have a full post up on this later — after I teach — but for now check out this comment and the photos and brief writeup here.

Short version: UC Irvine not only detained students for chalking during a demo designed to make the point that students shouldn’t be detained for chalking, they sent infamous campus police officer Jared Kemper, who drew his weapon on student protesters last week, to do it.

Tuesday Update | As noted below, the current assault on British higher education is being led by a coalition government of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Party’s national headquarters were stormed and trashed in a huge student march two weeks ago, but according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper it’s the Lib Dems who are worried this time around.

The last march was a London-only event, but tomorrow’s protests are taking place in cities and towns around Britain, and demonstrators are expected to target the district offices of Liberal Democratic members of parliament. As (again) noted below, the Lib Dems promised during the campaign to roll back tuition fees, only to reverse course when they gained power.

For a thorough but utterly readable introduction to the current crisis in British higher education, by the way, you could do a lot worse than reading this.

Original Post | More than fifty thousand students marched in London two weeks ago in protest against the British government’s unprecedented plans for massive higher aid cuts and a possible tripling of tuition fees. These protests, which saw thousands storm the national headquarters of the country’s governing Conservative Party, marked the first major public demonstration in opposition to cutbacks which are likely to touch every corner of British life.

Britain’s higher education system, home of some of the world’s most prestigious universities, was entirely tuition-free until the late 1990s, but government support has been falling, and tuition rising, since. Under the government’s new plan, annual tuition could rise as high as $15,000 a year.

Adding insult to injury, the new government’s junior partner is the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Nick Clegg — Britain’s new deputy Prime Minister — campaigned on a platform of eliminating tuition fees entirely. The Lib Dems took 23% of the vote in this year’s parliamentary elections, and they are a crucial component of the governing coalition.

Coordinated protests are planned at more than twenty cities across the UK on Wednesday — you can find details, and links to protest organizers’ websites, here.

Not every campus is waiting for Wednesday, however — students have already staged occupations at two universities. The Brunei Gallery at the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London has been under occupation since this morning, with a website/blog here. Some sixty students are also occupying a lecture hall at Manchester Metropolitan University.