Last month, a group of friends who hang out on Twitter made an excursion from San Diego to L.A. to try to appear on the game show The Price Is Right. One of them succeeded: Peggy Gartin, who goes by the handle @thepegisin, got called by the announcer to come on down.

Twitter has evolved into the backbone of a thriving little social media community here in San Diego. It's been a pleasant change. For the first 11 years that my wife and I lived here, San Diego was a bit of a wasteland for emerging Web technologies. We have Qualcomm here, and a thriving industry of military contractors and biotech, but if you tried to start a conversation about blogging or other social media, you usually got a blank look and, "Huh?"

Now, things are changing. I think it started with a series of "tweetups" -- social gatherings of Twitter users. At least, that's how I got hooked into the Web 2.0 community here. I went to my first San Diego Tweetup in June, and have been to several since, along with a couple of meetings of Refresh San Diego. I even got started organizing an event, the San Diego Geek Bonfire, along with Gina Trapani, until recently editor of the Lifehacker blog,

Peggy is one of the nicest and funniest people I've met at these gatherings, so I was stoked to see her moment of national television fame when it finally aired Tuesday.

You can watch full episodes of The Price Is Right here, although they seem to lag posting by a day or so. Look for the Feb. 10 episode when it comes up.

Peggy wore a T-shirt with her Twitter ID on it for the show, and identified herself and her friends as Twitter buddies, which led to host Drew Carey explaining Twitter. Just before he started the explanation, I tweeted, "Drew Carey is going to try to explain Twitter. Good luck with that. Heh." I find Twitter difficult to explain to people who haven't experienced it, and Carey was operating under the added handicap of trying to explain it in seconds to a game-show audience.

But Carey came through. Watch the clip here. I think it's the best explanation of Twitter for non-Twitterers ever: "Twitter lets you send short messages to a bunch of people who sign up for your name on Twitter. You can say, 'I'm on the way to the grocery store,' 'I'm at a club,' and you can send all these little messages and stay in touch with your friends." That pretty much says it all. (Video via northlight, another one of my San Diego tweeps).