Recently Microsoft sponsored a contest where the entries were PHP applications built on the Windows Azure platform. Brian Swan has posted an interview with Ben Waine, the latest winner of the contest who created an application called the "Twitter Sentiment Engine" that analyzes the sentiment towards various search terms on Twitter.

I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest. [...] I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading a bayesian filter he developed to help filter out some of the twitter spam.