tweet harvesting mark #1 - success

With a bit of help from this example:
http://www.jroller.com/evans/entry/parsing_json_with_python

Managed to work out how to parse out a parameterised number of tweets from a call to new function...

This JSON online parser helped me sort out what to look for in he twitter standard JSON.

JSON text string was converted to Python usable directory using standard JSON function, specifically by applying json.loads()