Then after some meaningless banter Bounder says this, presumably riffing off the “what is Bambuser actually for?” debate:

Being someone who can’t resist a really stupid idea…

I go and do it.

Here’s the video. Be aware that as I’m recording this it’s being streamed live and people are leaving comments, which is why I stop to read the screen every so often. But yeah, live eyebrow plucking. Enjoy.

On a more prosaic note, the integration of this with Twitter really works well. As soon as I start recording Bambuser sends out a message via Twitter to everyone who’s following me meaning I get an audience immediately. Pretty cool stuff.

Since the location data is not included in the default feeds and I’m not that savvy on playing with their API I’m blogging some of the stuff I’ve found in the hope someone else might be able to hack something together.

First off, a user search for “Birmingham UK” brings up 131 users. A long winded solution could be to pump all of their feeds into a Yahoo Pipe but it wouldn’t be updated with new users. Still, it’d be something. Of course you could also scrape those pages and turn the page URLs into RSS urls which could be automated once a week.

Twittermap lets you search for “Birmingham UK” and produces this:

Which is perfect, except the data isn’t available as a feed or even a list. The points on the map is actually quite long-winded and useless, truth be told. Still, they can obviously get the data from somewhere.

They’re doing interesting things with geotagging tweets but I’m not sure how this works exactly.

There’s a page on the Twitter wiki about tracking earthquakes which has some stuff on ways to geotag but it mostly seems like speculation.

Finally, Mawhin has produced a Yahoo Pipe that filters those your following according to a specified city that matches their profiles. I’m not sure exactly how it works but if this can be applied to the complete public feed it might be useful. If, of course, Pipes can keep up with the full public feed.

What I’m after is a big stream of nonsense that’s related purely by location. The equivalent of walking down New St waving a microphone about. It won’t be useful but it might be interesting. Anyone want to have a hack at it?