Overview
As soon as we found about the project 'ElectUA' by a Ukrainian NGO to setup a Twitter translation of 2009 Presendential election campaign, we have decided to roll out our website (nicer looking, but you decide). ElectUA used hashtag like #elect_ua, #elect_zp etc. to filter news reports.
Because hashtag actually pointed to specific geographic area, we thought why not link hashtags to Geo data: display circles of various sizes above cities with number of reports displayed as a number within a circle.
We added another neat feature that was not available in the original project: SMS news publishing. We setup keywords (spelled the same way as Twitter hashtags) on a shared shortcode 4647, installed a filter to screen incoming messages through the whitelist and created an RSS feed to display filtered messages. The feed was added as another news source and its news items were also displayed on the map.