matsu

Filtering #Anita

Some people have been complaining about the insane amount #Anita exposure on Twitter, so I designed a Yahoo Pipe to filter out any tweets which have the word “Anita” in them. Enjoy!

Can someone explain it to me?

Look at the following map of the Lisbon Metro in the airport area.  The dotted red line is what they are building now, all underground.  The solid blue line shows what could have been built, all on the surface, since 1993 when the Campo Grande station was opened.

I’m not against the new line being built.  I just want to know why we haven’t had a metro connection to the airport in the last 15 years for 10% of the cost of the line being built now, including the advantage of having a terminal 2 station too.  Can someone explain it to me?

update: in a little more detail.

Supporting Wikipedia

Wikipedia is perhaps one of the most successful (and disputed) projects on the internet, showing what people can do with their free time instead of watching television.

Although the content is provided for free by an enormous number of volunteers, there are technological and management costs.  The wikipedia page provides a link for one time donations, but there is a hidden option to contribute a monthly or yearly amount automatically.  I don’t have the faintest idea why this isn’t made more obvious (I haven’t found any wikipedia pages linking to it), but if you can’t contribute a whole lot of money at one time, here’s the way to make some money drip wikipedia’s way, little by little.

Kiva – global micro-funding project

My friend Ana has written on her blog about this very interesting project: Kiva.org – it’s a system that allows people in developing countries to receive micro-credit from anyone who wants to “invest” online with them, through local platforms.  You can browse the many small projects around the world on their website, and you can start lending from as little as $25 USD.  Each project will show how you will get repaid, the repay rate for each borrower, and a memo about the project itself.  A small, interest free credits market.  You can also add a donation to what you lend.  After lending:

100% of your funds will be sent to our local partner who will disburse your loan

You’ll receive periodic updates showing the impact of your loan

Once your loan is fully repaid, you may withdraw the funds or sponsor a new entrepreneur

They work with Paypal and credit cards.  If you usually donate money, or if you don’t donate money because you follow the “give them fishes vs. teach them to fish” motto this might be an excellent addition or alternative to making this a better world for all.

Interesting Twitter Apps

Four new applications that use the enormous amount of information that can be found on twitter.com have come to my attention this week.

The first two are the brainchildren of my friend Luis Figueiredo (T/B), Alpha Twitter and TwitSpam.  The first shows which individual URLs have been shared by the greatest number of users, a good way to check what is hot right now online.  The second does the reverse, showing the top single URLs “shared” by a single user spammer. Although you can always choose not to follow anyone, it’s a good way to see who is trying to use twitter as a “spamming” platform.

The two other applications are Tweet Clouds and TweetStats.  The first generates on the fly a word “cloud” based on the frequency certain words are used on a certain user’s (public) twitter timeline.  TweetStats collects a certain user’s twitter timeline on the fly to generate statistics of when, how, and to whom we tweet.

With twitter being the most used “micro blogging” platform, all these applications give different insights on the community and individual users and how they use the system.  If you don’t know what twitter is, click here.