Ruth Barnett, Twitter correspondent

Coverage of Twitter's role in receiving information from Iran during the protests there has led to hundreds of thousands of " tweets" being sent during peak hours.

However, the drawback from those hoping to gain insight into the latest developments is that the vast majority of messages are now coming from outside Iran.

In recent days, there have been around 10, 000 to 50, 000 tweets every hour mentioning " Iran", according to US blog Mashable and data from the trend tracker Trendrr.

The statistics suggest 2.25 million blog posts were written about the country in the last 24 hours, a significant sign of the way the political crisis in Tehran has captured the attention of a global web audience.

But in a single hour on Wednesday, more than 220, 000 messages on that topic were sent via Twitter.

Graph by Trendrr which shows the Twitter messages mentioning Iran

This coincided with a boom of people discussing the postponement of site maintenance, a move supported by the US State Department.

It has become harder and harder to find messages that seem to be from Iran itself - partly because widespread internet filters are making it difficult for non-experts to get online.

In addition, more people in countries such as the US and the UK are sending messages of support, which could be drowning out potentially-informative messages sent from Iran.

There is also a concerted effort by people outside Iran to help shield those tweeting from the country by changing their own profiles to indicate they are located in the Islamic republic.

They believe this will make it harder for authorities to find and punish genuine Iranian Twitter users.

Fake profiles and false reports are also on the increase. Some tweets have spread outlandish and easily-disproved rumours.

Other Twitter users are rallying to help verify the authenticity of those sending messages while some have drawn up lists of those that are definitely not genuine.

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