One of the challenges of search engine optimization these days is keeping pace with the constantly shifting pace of user interests and fads. Over the long term of months and years, Google has many trend tools that can help you trace important keywords that you can use to build content around. However, there are major trends and fads that build up and die down in a matter of days. This trend is exacerbated by social media tools like Digg, Facebook and Twitter, which accelerate the pace of trends.
The biggest challenge to creating good SEO content quickly to respond to current events is being aware of trends as soon as possible, before most other people are. Trending Topics on the main page of Twitter is a great way to see what people are talking about, but I like to use Google. These days Google will allow you to search what it has crawled on the web in the last hour for recent news. One really great technique is to find power Twitter users who focus on pop culture events and Twitter many times a day, and follow them, as they will often have the news up minutes before anyone else. And of course, Digg, Reddit, and other voting sites should often be scanned for new submissions BEFORE they have a lot of votes, so you can get the story early.
For an example, a few weeks ago Patrick Swayze passed away. If you were following the twitter account of a power Twitter user and checking it frequently, you would have a very good chance of learning of this before most of the internet. You would then immediately write a short article highlighting some of Patrick Swayze's best movies, add the hashtag #Swayze to the title, and posted it to your blog or website, then post a link to it on Twitter, all in about 15 minutes. I can guarantee you would get fairly substantial traffic from that post. The hardest part of trend-watching is being first on the scoop, after that it is just a matter of creating content which adds your own views or perspective and publishing that content ASAP.