Follow Barcamp Nashville Attendees

I’m at the Barcamp Nashville session in Nashville, Tennessee right now, trying to keep up with all the Twitter chatter and people. It used to be that you could hop onto Blastfollow.com, type in a hashtag, and then automatically follow anyone using that tag. Unfortunately, Blastfollow no longer works, now that Twitter has made all third party apps use their OAuth (and Blastfollow is still relying on username/password access).

There’s a basic way to cobble everything together in the meantime, before I go off and search for a Blastfollow alternative.

1. Go to Twitter Search and type in your hashtag. In this case, we’ll use #bcn10.

2. Copy the URL, or, if you want to get really creative, scroll down to the bottom of the results page, click OLDER, and then when that page comes up, click NEWER. Copy that link instead.

Copy this entire code. Note the "page=1" in the last half of the code.

3. Head over to TweepML.org, and set up an account. Then, set up a new list. At the top of the screen is a place to drop in the URL of a list you want to follow. Paste the URL you just copied, and hit find.

Drop the URL you copied into the "Find Users" text bar.

4. TweepML will begin to scrape all the Twitter users off that page, and create a list in the box underneath the “Find User” text bar. Next, you can do one of two things:

• Go back to the Twitter search page, click OLDER, and then copy that URL.
• Scroll through the URL to “page=1″ inside the code, and change it to “page=2″.

5. Hit Find again. TweepML will scrape more Twitter names, and append them to that list. Do this a couple times, and then hit the Generate TweepML button at the bottom of the page.

6. When the new list shows up, “View” it, select the people you want to follow, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and follow the instructions to start following everyone on your list. The system will follow the conference attendees for you, and notify the people you’ve just started following them.

One caveat: please don’t use this system to start generating a list so you can spam people. Please use knowledge like this only for good, not evil. Use it to follow people you’re at a conference with, not people you want to sell your crap to.

You can also see the Barcamp Nashville list I created here.

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My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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