There are several ways to find out who is tweeting near your location.. apart from searching on Twitter ranking lists, you can do a real-time scan of tweets using several tools. Here are some ways you can find Twitter users near you!

1. Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter’s very own Advanced Search gives you the option of zeroing in on tweets from users withint a specific location.See the images below for Twitter’s built-in advanced search. I did a search for ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘New York’. You can click on this link to see the results yourself.

Ever wanted to see what people are posting in real-time to Twitpic, the popular image sharing website for Twitter users? Now you can with twipick, a real-time stream of pictures posted to Twitpic.

Not only can you view the latest Twitpic images but you can also do a keyword search for just about anything, although you aren’t likely to get results for obscure terms. The search engine seems to pull results based on keywords used in comments and descriptions on twitpic, which means you might not always get what you’re looking for. But still it offers fairly good results.

Twitterfall is quite possibly the best Twitter keyword tracking tool I’ve seen so far. It’s got a simple interface but packs a lot of features. You can change the speed of the tweet stream from 0.5 tweets per second to a dizzy 10 tweets per second. In terms of tracking you can choose the specific location of the tweets and include as many custom keywords as you want, all of them will appear in the same stream.

True to its namesake, Monitter allows you to input a couple of keywords and track what the twitter community is saying. It’s a browser-based tool, and all you need to do is to open it in a new tab, put in your keywords and the tweets will stream past continously. Some things I like about it: you can chose to receive tweets from a specific location, for example 10km of Manhatten. Or you can track tweets only in a specific language (French, English, Spanish and German).