Update:
Twitter now has a way to find other local tweeters with it’s new search feature, so I’ve created a new twitter account to connect with local tweeters, click here to follow Twitter.com/EthanD_Local

*warning major geek talk used in this post, if you don’t understand what the heck I’m talking about don’t worry 🙂

Hello my name is Ethan and I am a tech geek…. hi ethan

I spend a lot of time on the internets and have “virtually” met tons of really cool people. I have actually met quite a few of these people in real life. First through Xanga I met some great people then met them for real when I traveled to California. I them met some more folks via twitter down in Washington DC both at the Heritage foundation’s modern media strategies workshop and at CPAC.

But there are a ton of cool people in the world and I can’t “follow” all of them.

So in my ruminations of this subject I have decided that the megatrend is for people worldwide to connect but the counter trend is for the Internet to get very local.

One tool that I’ve begun using to achieve the local nature of the internet is Twitter.com. I discovered @KnownHuman while using the Super tuesday Google Maps/Twitter mashup which would display election related tweets via their location on Google maps.

And when he tweets about local supermarkets I am much more interested than when @scobleizer tweets about a restaurant in Southern California. This local interest makes the internet much more engaging.

So I went on a quest to find all the people in Lancaster, PA on Twitter, I used google to search site:twitter.com location lancaster pa

hat tip to Radical Behavior

And I found several people whom I am now following.

Here is my local list for Tweeter’s in Lancaster, PA If you know of any more please leave a comment

Matthew Harrington
@penti

Lon Farenwald
@lfaren
http://ghostwheel.net/

P. Bradley Robb
@KnownHuman
http://www.bradleyrobb.net/

Ethan Demme (me)
@ethand
http://ethandemme.com

Paul Rothrock
@icelander
http://www.movetoiceland.com/

Josh Babetski
@quixado
http://www.quixoticbravado.com/

@tracibabe

Kristofer Harzinski
@kharzinski
http://www.krisharzinski.org/

Morgan Kochel
@Alkhemist
http://www.ziki.com/en/alkhemist
http://zodpa.blogspot.com/

Admittedly this works well in a small non techie town like Lancaster Pennsylvania but try it out and see who you can find.

Comments?

I ran across this interesting blog today [pwds.wordpress.com]

The blog is about “People With Disabilities in Cambodia” and is run by Heng Phan who described the blogs purpose as this, “My goal just want to share some reality of the Cambodian Poor People living with in the communities, especially about the disabled persons and children with disabilities.”

One of the posts was about a new training course to teach Cambodians with disabilities how to blog.

Throught this training course we hope that they will knew: What is the new free technology media: What is Blog? How is Blog working? How to create Blog? What is the advantage of the Blog? we hope Cambodian disabled people understand and will have abilities to create and use Blog and will knew cleary about the advantage of using the new free technology media system.

Their goal through all of this is to “Help Disabled People to Help Themselves”

Personally I think this is awesome! and I hope the training goes well. I’ve been sort of involved with Joni and Friends eastern PA and hopefully will be helping them get started in the blogging world. Blogging and other social media could have a great impact on the disabled community. Joni and friends has several family camps during the year and could easily use blogging and social networking to keep in touch during the year.

There is a lot of bad stuff in the world but I am constantly encouraged by hearing the good news of people reaching out and helping each other.