I know this is the umpteenth time I’ve written about Twitter recently, but there’s so much happening so fast that it’s hard not to at the moment – although I should point out I do spend most of my time working on things other than Twitter – and I’ll be writing more about those after I launch the blog’s redesign at Easter.

What’s caught my eye today is a post by Chris Dalby in which he talks about the @medway_tweet engine he’s set up for Medway. I should point out at this stage that Chris has no connection (that I know of) to the council in Medway – indeed the only reason I know of Chris is because our Twitter monitoring picked up his messages about @medway_tweet.

The @medway_tweet engine scans Twitter and BBC Backstage for mentions of Medway and then reposts them in a single Twitter feed.

By putting all conversations about Medway in one place, the feed is proving really valuable in connecting people who share no common interests other than they have written about Medway on Twitter. I’m certainly making connections with people that are actively using social media in Medway that I wouldn’t have connected with any other way – many of these don’t disclose a location on their Twitter bio, so without the @medway_tweet engine the connection wouldn’t have been made.

Chris has just launched similar feeds for @barnet_tweet and @hackney_tweet.

I think it’s great Chris has set these feeds up and it’ll be really interesting to see what happens with them.

I can see them emerging as a means to create effective geographically-specific networks of people on Twitter, in line with the development of hyper-local communities on other social media platforms.

For more information check out Chris’s blog at www.yellowpark.net.