A new response to DIYcity Challenge #1, submitted by Ben Marvin.
URL: http://www.twitter.com/485sucks
Ben's description:
Servicing the Charlotte metro area, this traffic bot uses the emailed traffic reports from a local radio station and they are fed through ping.fm into the twitter account.
Also still testing is the user reporting feature. Users send a @reply in the format of: "@485sucks report Accident: Tryon and 5th st." and using a feed from search.twitter.com fed through tweetbots, the user tips are tweeted.
Ben's tip for others working in the same area:
Relying on feed based data and using something like TwitterFeed results in delayed reports and also a stack of 5 or so tweets at a time which can annoy many users. The ping.fm method is much cleaner.
Cool, thanks Ben.