There was a time when surveying the public on a matter of national interest meant conducting man-on-the-street interviews or reading the angry letters to the editor of a local paper. But thanks to this fancy Internet and the wonders of social media those antiquated methods are as dated as, well, mood rings.
However, the Olympics will yoke the dated and the modern together as part of these Olympic Games by turning London's landmark Eye into - get this - a social media-fueled mood ring.
(For those of you too young to remember mood rings: they were a '70s relic, little thermometers embedded within stones which allegedly changed color based on whatever mood you happened to be in at the moment)
Here's the story, via Mashable: EDF Energy has contracted a social media analytics expert named Mike Thelwall and a linguistics team known as Sosolimited to survey UK-based Twitter sentiment on the Games. An algorithm will translate the sentiment into a prevailing mood: happy, sad, indifferent, what have you. During every night's 30-minute light show, the Eye will glow yellow if England is in a positive mood, purple if negative, and green if indifferent.
The country's mood will surely follow the success of its athletes and its operations. We'd be willing to bet that you'll be able to lay a bet or two on exactly how many days will come up in each of the three moods given all the other things you seem to be able to bet on at the Olympics.
Jay Busbee | Fourth-Place Medal