What is Cala Boca Galvao?

If you came here looking for a short and accurate answer, here it is.

Short answer: “Cala boca Galvao” is a Portuguese phrase that translates to “Shut up, Galvao” in English, addressed to Brazilian sports commentator Galvão Bueno.

If you’re like me who became curious after seeing the phrase become extremely popular on Twitter and did some Google search, here’s my explanation.

Long answer: “Cala boca Galvao” became the top worldwide trending topic on Twitter with tremendous amounts of related tweets coming in every minute. Reading the tweets, I got confused with its real meaning. Some tweets mention Lady Gaga; others, that of a bird. I already know that it’s a foreign language but didn’t know that it was Portuguese. So I did some searching, and found a series of internet pranks directed at Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian football commentator.

Prank 1: that “Cala boca Galvao” is an endangered species of bird

This is probably what drove droves of people tweeting the phrase. It supposedly refers to a rare breed of bird in Brazil and to save it, you only need to make one tweet. “One second to tweet. One second to save a life.” Just watch this video and you’ll see.

Prank 2: that “Cala boca Galvao” is the new Lady Gaga song

Honestly speaking, this one is believable. The song makes use of GaGa-Galvao alliteration, which has a nice catchy tune to it. The song is entirely about the bird though. One plus factor for this prank is how people say that this and that artist will be in Lady Gaga’s Cala boca Galvao music video. Funny!

Lady Gaga’s Cala boca Galvao music video, song

I have some online Brazilian friends so I asked them. “Cala boca Galvao” is indeed popular in Brazil, and it pertains to Galvão Bueno. In light of the 2010 World Cup in which Galvao was a commentator, the phrase got extremely popular when some pranks telling him to shut up sprang up. When I asked my friends why people want the sports caster to shut up, they said that “he was annoying” and that he was “dumb.” I say “aouhiauehou.”

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I started using Twitter on October 11, 2008 with my first Tweet “I’m starting my twitter.” At first, I was just curious about how this service worked. It was rapidly growing in popularity back then  and I just had to try it.

I use Twitter mainly for short messages. So-called microblogging, these posts are too short for a full blog post. It suits me well because I do not like writing wrong sentences and paragraphs. Oh, I do love one-word tweets.

I love sharing links I find on the web. Twitter is like a bookmark. There are times when I go back to my past tweets to find an interesting link I shared before but have forgotten.

Twitter is my online diary. When I want to remember a particular event, I make a tweet — same purpose as marking a calendar with special events.

Lastly, I do answer the question “What are you doing?”. I may tweet the food I am currently eating, my current mood and the website I am reading.

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Techcrunch has recently awarded the winners of the annual Crunchies. Techcrunch is among the top technology blogs and competitions like these not only show the current trends on the web but also give the newcomers much needed publicity.

The winners were determined by online voting – one vote per IP address per day. I don’t know about this but I think there should be a team of professionals whose votes had more weight making the online voting only a percentage of the final tally.

Facebook won in the Best Overall Startup category. No surprises because it is still the leading social network. Twitter came in at second with its many improvements and explosive growth in 2009.

The Best New Product of 2009 is Bing, the search engine of Microsoft. Its launch (or relaunch) last year was big news, being a Microsoft product and all. And the name Bing? It got me wondering why they changed the name from the already recognized Live brand.

Other categories saw popular nominees taking the win.The people awards were executives from other nominees. The most interesting category, at least for me was the Best Time Sink application.

Google and Microsoft products were abundant as well as Facebook-related ones. Farmville won the Best Social App award and Zynga was a finalist in the Best Overall Startup. Mobile applications also dominated some of the categories.

I haven’t heard/seen/read about some of the nominees so I’m glad these new applications were given the spotlight.

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