How Twitter Can Help you to Find People in Your Local Community

For people new to Twitter who wants to see who is twittering around your own locality there is a tool that combines the googlemap application and twitter users - called Googlemap Twitter Mashup. All you do is put in your zip or postcode and it will show you "tweets" from people who live near you.
May be useful in finding contacts around where you live - interestingly there was no one who lived near me!