Twitter Bot Encyclopedia' by Elizaveta Pritychenko.

http://leeeeza.com/twitter-bot-encyclopedia.html

http://p-dpa.net/work/twitter-bot-encyclopedia/

Captain Tweet by Inge Hoonte

Follows the Captain's James Cook logs, posting its day to day entries.

Welcome on board of the Weymouth. This is the captain's log for the journey between Portsmouth, England, and Algoa Bay, South Africa. Departure July 10, 1819.

Code

Lots of data is available from Twitter via a public API (so using an API key may not be required, depending on your use)

Print the latest tweets from a particular user

See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/statuses/user_timeline

import urllib2, json
screen_name = "TRACKGent"
url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=" + screen_name
data = json.load(urllib2.urlopen(url))

print len(data), "tweets"
tweet = data[0]
print tweet.keys()

for tweet in data:
    print tweet['text']

Other examples

You can also use feedparser:

import feedparser
 
url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=feel"
feed = feedparser.parse(url)
for e in feed.entries:
    print e.title.encode("utf-8")

import feedparser
 
url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=feel"
feed = feedparser.parse(url)
for e in feed.entries:
    for word in e.title.split():
        print word.encode("utf-8")

An older example using JSON:

from urllib import urlencode
import urllib2
import json


def openURL (url, user_agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091109 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.5"):
    """
    Returns: tuple with (file, actualurl)
    sets user_agent & follows redirection if necessary
    realurl maybe different than url in the case of a redirect
    """    
    request = urllib2.Request(url)
    if user_agent:
        request.add_header("User-Agent", user_agent)
    pagefile=urllib2.urlopen(request)
    realurl = pagefile.geturl()
    return (pagefile, realurl)

def getJSON (url):
    (f, url) = openURL(url)
    return json.loads(f.read())

TWITTER_SEARCH = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json"

data = getJSON(TWITTER_SEARCH + "?" + urlencode({'q': 'Rotterdam'}))
for r in data['results']:
    print r['text']