While it's fun to follow some of the bigger names on Twitter like Scoble, Jason, Leo, and Kevin, it's even better when you find others with similar interests with whom you can have real conversations. And even better than that is finding others to connect with from your same hometown. Connecting with other locals is something that the site TwitterLocal has helped facilitate for some time, but now they've added a new feature for finding top local Twitterers: a TwitterLocal Leader Board showing a city's top tweeters.
Formerly, the TwitterLocal Leader Board was just ranking the top tweeting cities worldwide by counting the number of tweets within the past 24 hours at that location. Here you can see how popular Twitter is with early adopters (San Francisco is #2) or how Twitter has taken off in Japan, with Tokyo occupying the #1 position and Osaka coming in at #8.
But now the Leader Board features the top twitterers in each of these top cities, too. This new feature was pointed out in a Silicon Florist blog post, where Rick Turoczy said that the TwitterLocal Leader Board represented "one of the most compelling slicing-and-dicings of the Twitter types" he's seen.
It's a lot of fun to see that, for example, Rick Mahn is going off on Twitter more than anybody else in Minneapolis, MN. Erik Visser has more to say than almost anyone else in Amsterdam today. Traveling to Nashville, TN? Karla might be a good person to ping about the local scene.
To access the Twitter rankings for a city, you can click on the city from the TwitterLocal Leader Board's list of cities. But what's great is that even if your city isn't listed on the Leader Board, you're not left out. You can just type in your city's name and do a search from the homepage instead. On the results page for your city, you'll see the top twitterers from your very own hometown.
However, it should be noted that the TwitterLocal top twitterers aren't ranked in quite the same way as other big sites, like Twitterholic, rank Twitter users - that is, by followers, friends, and updates. The TwitterLocal top twitterers are ranked solely by number of tweets in the past 24 hours.
Barack Obama has called President Bush's comments on appeasement "exactly the kind of appalling attack that's divided our country and alienates us from the rest of the world."
AFP - Leaders from Latin America and the European Union gathered in Peru Friday for a summit aimed at tackling poverty and climate change, but which was bogged down by differences over trade.
Reuters - Zimbabwe said on Friday it would hold a
delayed presidential election run-off on June 27, when the
opposition hopes to oust veteran leader Robert Mugabe after
nearly three decades in power.
While it's fun to follow some of the bigger names on Twitter like 
Top Tweeters from San Fransisco
