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How to Find Local Twitter Users From Your City

Twitterlocal.net is a site that lets you find local Twitter users based on proximity to a given location. They got mentioned quite a bit on Twitter today due to a newly created leader board that shows a breakdown of locations with the most tweets over the last 24 hours. The way it works is you supply the location in the form of a zip code or city / state combo along with a selected range within # of miles and it returns a list of the top tweeters in the area.

I decided I wanted to find all users from my city. So I went ahead and entered Chatsworth CA with a range of 1 mile (the minimum). The results came back with only 2 users, myself and 1 other user. Turns out the results only shows users who have sent a tweet within a 24 hour period. It got me thinking about how I can find all users from my city. I couldn’t find a service that does this though, so I had an idea.

I figured I could come up with query to Google to find this so I went ahead and created this query “site:twitter.com location chatsworth ca“. I figured I’d query the profile pages of all Twitter users who supplied their location. Sure enough I got more records. It returned 5 users. This seems to be a nice little hack to find users of your city until Twitterlocal.net offers to show all users or another site comes along that does.

Search to Buy the Best Hair Dryer for my Wife

My wife’s current hairdryer had just died. It was a pretty good one that had cost her ~$100 (I had no idea they could cost that much). But she really liked it. We went to Costco and she bought some $20 model they had over there and had been using it but knew that she didn’t like it as much. Being the tech gadget freak that I am, I decided to employ my research and purchasing skills as if I were buying some new computer accessory, to find her the best hairdryer I could as a birthday gift.

So I searched around for some reviews and comparisons of top hairdryers out there. The best I found was “How to pick the best professional hair dryer” at Missiko.com and “Buying The Right Hair Dryer” from CBS News. After reading each of these it became clear that a two rose to the top which were the Farouk CHI Turbo & Rocket Ionic hair dryer as well as the T3 Evolution Tourmaline hair dryer. I learned about what makes these higher end hair dryers so much better based on use of negatively charged ions, tourmaline, and ceramics. So my next step was to find some user reviews for each of these which I found over at a commerce site called Folica.com. They had a good number of user reviews for the Chi Turbo, Chi Rocket as well as the T3 Evolution. After thinking about it some more I decided to get my wife the Chi Rocket. Needless to say my wife was very happy not only with the hair dryer I bought her, but with the research I did to make sure I got her the best one.

Guys, let me tell you, going through a process like this to get your lady a tech gadget can go a long way in getting her to appreciate the nuances of getting better gear. It can also open the door to her understanding why we go through so much trouble selecting our gear. Hopefully she will understand this as I decide which High Def DVD player I will be purchasing soon.

3 Steps to a Perfect Online Purchase and a List of Resources

My process for buying products can be quite involved and I equate it to more of a lifecycle, especially if the product is technology related. Impulse buyers need not apply. This post will cover concepts on how to use the web as a tool for each step and list resources that help achieve them. To make the process relevant I’ll use buying a digital camera as the product example.

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How to get a Free Upgrade to Road Runner Extreme

I just had an unexpected surprise after a phone call to Time Warner today about my current Road Runner pricing. I’ve recently been going over my current monthly expenses and paying especially close attention to the recurring monthly service bills I have. Of those I was currently paying $39.95 a month for Road Runner Standard service cable internet through Time Warner. I had recently seen them advertise the same service for new customers for $29.95 for 12 months. I know that I could save a considerable amount of money by switching back to DSL which I had used a few years back.

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10 Web Widgets to Share Interests on Your Site

So many of the sites I visit today offer cool tools, API’s and feeds to allow you to display the personal content you generate on them to your own site. The sites and tools I am focusing on here are those that collect information about personal interests that help define who you are. After coming across so many of these sites that offer external feeds, I began to realize that if you were to aggregate much of this information in one place, you could provide an interesting window for others to look through. So what would be the purpose in doing that? Well, you could either provide a first impression to visitors giving them an idea of who you are, or let friends know what you’ve been up to lately. In either case I will show you several sites and tools available along many different categories that will allow you to add them to your blog or site.

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