Determining the frequency of Twitter tweets on a certain topic

Is there a way for me to determine the total number of Twitter messages on a given trend topic (e.g. frequency of Twitter messages with subject matter on Haiti/#Haiti) at a given instance in time using the Twitter API? I'm writing a script in Python that will monitor Twitte开发者_运维问答r traffic over a long spell of time and I was wondering how I could go about doing this.

Yes. Use the Twitter Streaming API to get a representative sample.

You might take a look at this site (see below) Drew has several sources of information and was to look at the data. Network of People who Twitter about R http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=1471